Tampa, Florida, 1898: a frontier where the old world meets the new. 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; its electric lighting designed by Edison. This fairy-tale castle anchored by the water"s edge is a winter magnet for bankers and industrialists, stockbrokers and shipping merchants, attorneys and architects and celebrities who come from as far away as Europe. But the hotel has one permanent resident, the enigmatic and exotic Monsieur Goulet III, amateur phrenologist and wig-maker to the plain and the glamorous alike - to any resident of Tampa whose desire for the transformations he creates is matched by pockets deep enough to meet his price. As the winter of 1898 nears its end, Goulet becomes entranced by the spectacular silver-blonde hair of a beautiful young widow, Marion Unger, and determines that the transformation it inspires him to create will be his masterpiece. But the raw material he needs for its completion is hard to come by, and so he drives his resourceful night-scavenger - a teenage cigar-maker who has fled the war in Cuba - to increasingly extreme efforts. As the fates of the widow, the wigmaker and the scavenger become ever more tightly entwined, Goulet"s true nature, hitherto cleverly and obsessively disguised, begins to show itself, until it becomes clear that he will allow nothing to impede the progress of his ultimate transformation.