Book Synopsis: "'There was, from the beginning, a palpable sense of something alien in the house.'"
Detective Steve Carella finds these words in the typewriter of Gregory Craig, famous author of tales of the supernatural. He has already discovered Mr. Craig's body in an adjoining bedroom, his face and torso punctuated by stab wounds. This is the second corpse that Carella and his partner, Cotton Hawes, have found in the space of thirty minutes -- the first just outside the building in which they are now standing. The detectives are inclined to believe that the two murders are somehow connected; what Carella cannot know is that the sentence he is reading, assumed to be the beginning of Craig's new novel, will shortly come screaming to life.
For as the investigation proceeds, Carella finds himself inextricably involved in a line of inquiry unlike any other he has ever pursued when he meets the beautiful and enigmatic Hillary Scott, Craig's lover. At first Carella is drawn to her because of her eerie resemblance to his own great love, his wife, Teddy. But his fascination with Hillary grows as she takes him in directions that neither his intellect nor his heart can accept. And when the clues that she seems to pull out of thin air prove to be uncannily accurate, he is thrust into an investigation that is as bizarre as most cases are routine, one that will ultimately lead him to an extraordinary confrontation in a deserted Massachusetts summer cottage and the frightening world of the occult.
