The Interpretation of Murder opens on a hot summer night in 1909 as Sigmund Freud disembarks in New York from a steamship. With Freud is his rival Carl Jung; waiting for him on the docks is a young physician named Stratham Younger, one of Freud's most devoted American supporters. So begins this story of what will be the great genius's first--and last--journey to America.

    The morning after his arrival, a beautiful young woman is found dead in an apartment in one of the city's grand new skyscrapers, the Balmoral. The next day brings a similar crime in a townhouse on Gramercy Park. Only this time the young heiress, Nora Acton, escapes with her life--but with no memory of the attack. Asked to consult on the case, Dr.Younger calls on Freud to guide him through the girl's analysis. Their investigation, and the pursuit of the culprit, lead throughout New York, from the luxurious ballrooms of the Waldorf-Astoria, to the skyscrapers rising on seemingly every street cornor, to the bottom of the East River, where laborers dig thorugh the silt to build the foundation of the Manhattan Bridge.

      Drawing on Freud's case histories, Shakepeare's Hamlet, and the historical details of a city on the brink of modernity, The Interpretation of Murder introduces a brilliant new storyteller who, in the words of The New York Times, "will be no ordinary pop cultural sensation."