Wallace Kerrigan is Vice President in charge of commercial loans at the Bank of California in Hollywood. He agrees to finance a low-budget noir thriller in the vein of Alfred Hitchcock's "Spellbound." Its producer, knowing that moviegoers want their new psychological tales to have a veneer of authenticity, has hired a consultant from the Los Angeles Institute of Psychoanalysis. But a killer begins to target members of this troubled, secret-ridden institution. The first victim is a training analyst given to intimidating professional colleagues with his knowledge of embarrassing events from their earlier lives in Germany. Wally and his jewelry designing mistress Pearl Seagrove investigate with the aid of two young graduates from the Los Angeles Institute. They soon learn that the school is a warren of explosive secrets. Main clues in their investigation-a lost book by Sigmund Freud, an unknown essay by Ernst Simmel, correspondence relating to their patients-lead back to Weimar Germany and its prophetic fascination with early twentieth-century serial killers. The fourth novel in the Wallace Kerrigan/Pearl Seagrove mysteries sets the optimistic American experience of immigrant psychoanalysts against their European pasts. With its visits to movie sets, businesses, and restaurants, topped off with a fantastic evening at Billy Berg's Swing Club in Hollywood, the book also offers a rich and amusing portrait of post-war Los Angeles.