In this fascinating psychological neo-noir mystery, a notorious late 19th-century photograph provides the key to a contemporary murder.
In 1882, the young Lou Andreas-Salome, writer, psychoanalyst and femme fatale, appears with Friedrich Nietzche and another man in a bizarre photograph taken in Luzern, Switzerland. Over thirty years later, an intense art student in Freud s Vienna presents Lou Salome with his own drawing based on the infamous photograph.
In the present day, Tess Berenson, a brilliant performance artist, moves into an art deco loft in downtown Oakland, California. Her new apartment, she learns, was vacated in a hurry by a professional dominatrix who used the name Chantal Desforges. Tess s curiosity about Chantal intensifies when her body is discovered in the trunk of a stolen car at Oakland airport.
Embarking on an obsessive investigation into the murder, Tess discovers a link to the original Luzern photograph and the 1913 drawing but as she gets closer to the shocking truth, Tess finds that she too is in jeopardy."