Part murder mystery and all jet-black satire, and based on a real life scandal, this edgy novella tells the story of Léopold Sfax, world-renowned as the creator of "The Theory"—a bizarre literary theory that grew from an intellectual folly to a dominant school of criticism that enslaved college campuses across the country.However, The Theory, which holds that the text of any piece of writing tells us all that we need to know about its author (as if the author himself is "dead") takes on extra perversity when the revered—or is it feared?—Sfax is found to have once written something that seems...well, murderously revealing.In the hands of Gilbert Adair, it's a dexterously wrought and hysterically devilish look at academic cultishness. It's also a taut metaphysical murder mystery that confounds the reader's expectations on almost every page and reserves its most stunning surprise—the ultimate whodunit twist—for the very last page.