In the sweltering summer of 1841, Mary Rogers, a popular tobacco shop counter girl, is found brutally murdered in the shallows of the Hudson River. John Colt, scion of the firearm fortune, beats his publisher to death with a hatchet. And young Irish gang leader Tommy Coleman is accused of killing his daughter, wife, and her former lover. Charged with solving it all is High Constable Jacob Hays, whose investigation will span a decade, involving gang wars, grave robbers, and clues hidden in poems by the hopeless romantic and minstrel of the night, Edgar Allan Poe.

What is this thing called love? And where has it gone in contemporary fiction? Do "serious" young writers still attempt love stories? If they do, are the tales they tell drenched in cynicism or tenderness? Is modern love about intimacy, or desire, or obsession, or simple hard-edged attitude? Or all of the above? Love is Strange answers these questions by collecting work from sixteen writers who prowl the edges of human experience and literary form to evoke the landscape of American love from deepest downtown New York and decadent California to politically correct campuses and surreal suburbia.