"Bright, ambitious, and handsome, Ross Ohrenstedt is a highflier in the fashionable field of queer studies, flourishing amid the backstabbing and petty intrigues of academia. He has just taken a prestigious university position in Los Angeles and has been appointed to oversee the collection of papers and works of Damon Von Slyke, prominent man of letters and leading light of the gay literary salon known as the Purple Circle."--BOOK JACKET. "Sorting through the papers, Ross stumbles across a "lost" work by an unknown author. His quest to identify the mystery writer and achieve the glory of scholastic tenure unveils the lives and wild times of a group of writers who in the 1970s and 1980s broke new ground in the creation of a gay literary sensibility. As his search uncovers increasingly bizarre and unbalanced facts about the Purple Circle members, Ross finds himself the target of menacing attempts to derail his investigation."--BOOK JACKET. "But the dark truth contained within The Book of Lies is even more startling."--BOOK JACKET. "Felice Picano's novel is at once a mystery, a comical roman a clef, and a send-up of the new Ivory Tower."--BOOK JACKET.