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 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. As the winter of 1898 nears its end, Goulet is entranced by the head of hair belonging to the young widow Marion Unger. But the raw material he needs to complete his greatest masterpiece is hard to come by, so he drives his gifted night-scavenger - a teenage cigar-maker who is a refugee from the war in Cuba - to increasingly extreme efforts. As these three unlikely accomplices become ever more tightly entwined, the secret depths of Goulet's nature rise to the surface, leading to an electrifying conclusion.