This is a sequel to King's novel Touchstone. The action has moved from London to Paris; it's three years later (the fall of 1929), and Harris Stuyvesant, former Bureau of Investigation agent is now eking out a precarious living as a private investigator in Europe. At the moment he's being paid a handsome retainer to troll the cafes and bars of Montparnasse, looking for Pip Crosby, a young American woman who came to Paris to experience la vie boh`eme, and suddenly seems to have dropped out of sight. Her family in Boston are concerned enough to hire Stuyvesant.
As Stuyvesant tracks Pip's erratic passage through the expatriate community of artists and writers he discovers that she has had dealings with many of them as an artist's model and aspiring actress and habitue of the clubs and cabarets. But none of them remember seeing her recently.
The investigation takes a darker turn however when Stuyvesant discovers Pip had been taken on as an actress at the Theatre de Grand-Guignol in Montmartre, where murder, depravity and sexual perversions are enacted on stage as a kind of psychological shock treatment for the lingering traumatic aftereffects of the Great War. At least, this is the theory argued by the Theatre's patron, the Comte Charmentier, a wealthy connoisseur of death. His great family mansion is built over the famous Paris catacombs filled with the bones of the dead in the Place D'Enfer; indeed a stair descending from the mansion into the catacombs leads to a great hall decorated with tapestries depicting the Danse Macabre, the "Dance with Death," where the Comte entertains guests.
Soon Stuyvesant begins to suspect that more than one missing girl has been enticed into a Danse Macabre among the bones of Paris, by an artist of death who renders his masterpieces in flesh and blood.
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