The Last Taxpayer at King Henry's Faire

The Last Known Taxpayer at King Henry's Faire is a satiric crime novel about two IRS agents, Nix and Steiger, who are assigned a ten-year-old case where the last known taxpayer is dead. Despised by their boss, they wonder if he's out to get them. When they learn that the tax delinquent business is a common association of carnies under the name `King Henry's Faire', they're sure he is.

The main character, Gwendolyn Nix, is hard-bitten, intolerant, and abrasive, except with her partner, Steiger, and the Fool, whom she meets at King Henry's Faire. Nix and Steiger try to determine the identity of the current taxpayer and why he or she stopped filing and paying taxes but they are given the royal runaround by the alcoholic, sex obsessed, and drug addled King, who has assumed control of the Faire, maintaining that he enjoys sovereign immunity, pardon powers, and the divine right of kings.

Nix and Steiger solve a ten-year old murder, see their boss drowned in a quarry, expose a vile pornography ring, and close the case on King Henry's Faire.

If Helen DeWitt, Jonathan Lethem, and David Sedaris were having drinks, they'd use this book to balance the table.