Author Description

Tampa, Florida, 1898: a frontier where the old world meets the new, and where miracles of transformation are possible. Dominating the town is the new Tampa Bay Hotel, with its tangle of Moorish minarets, cupolas and arches, its Byzantine domes and thirteen crescent moons, and its electric lighting designed by Edison. This fairy-tale castle anchored by the water's edge is a winter magnet for the best sorts of people - bankers and industrialists, stockbrokers and shipping merchants, attorneys and architects and celebrities who come form the big northern cities and from Europe.But the hotel does have one permanent year-round resident, a most exotic creature by the name of Monsieur Lucien Goulet III, wig-maker to the rich and glamorous, and indeed to any resident of Tampa whose desire for the transformations he creates is keen enough to meet his price.