A seamless melding of the intricate plotting of Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose ; the side-splitting humor of John Kennedy Toole in A Confederacy of Dunces ; and the fabulous world of William Blake. In 1977, Ickey Jerusalem, San Francisco's golden-boy poet laureate, is found dead in a locked first-class toilet on an arriving red-eye flight. Ded Smith, a desperately unhappy, intelligent philistine with a highly developed philosophy to match, is called in to investigate the poet's death. Thus begins a series of hilarious encounters with the members of Jerusalem's coterie. Ded soon realizes that to find out what happened, he must not only collect his usual detective's clues but also, despite his own poetically challenged outlook, get into the dead poet's mind. Fighting his way through blasphemous funerals, drug-induced dreams, poetry-charged lovemaking, offbeat philosophical discussions, and much, much more, he begins to piece together Jerusalem's seductive, all-encompassing metaphysics. But by then, the attempts to kill Ded and the others have begun. Before Ded's death-dodging luck runs out, will he be able to solve the case and perhaps, in the process, develop a new way of looking at the world that might allow him to replace his unhappiness with joy?.