New York playwright Gordon Dahlquist woke up famous overnight, as they say, when Penguin Publishing offered him a two million dollar contract for his debut novel The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters and its future sequel. So, the characters: Miss Temple did not come to the city in search of adventure at all - she is looking for a husband. But when her fiancé Roger Bascombe, a rising star in the Foreign Office secretariat, suddenly breaks off their engagement, Miss Temple decides to find out why. She secretly follows Roger to an ominous masquerade ball, and she is sucked into a bloody - in the most literal sense of the word - whirlpool...Cardinal Chan is an assassin widely known in narrow circles. Having discovered that his next target - a dragoon colonel in a red uniform and a carnival mask - has already been killed, he firmly decides to find the true culprits and is now forced to flee both from them and from his former employers... Doctor Svenson is called upon not only to monitor the health of his entrusted his care of the Crown Prince of Mecklenburg, but also to save him from various dangerous situations. Usually we are talking about nothing more than the consequences of another revelry or brawl, but now the prince has become a victim of some devilish “process” that threatens the very soul of man... Their paths will cross.