Dr. Neruda is a man of success, talent, and a harrowing past. The son of a charismatic Spanish journalist and the fragile, black sheep of a Jewish American family, his personal history is one of incest, violence, lust, manipulation, and betrayal. But as a grown man, Dr. Neruda has learned to channel the agonies of his youth into the discipline of Freudian psychotherapy, brilliantly rescuing the wounded from the throes of their tormented psyches.

Now one of his cases - one of his greatest successes - has violently unraveled. And Dr. Neruda is obsessed with finding out why.

1. Interviewing the people who affected his patient's life and death, Dr. Neruda finds a den of darkly entwined and opposing psyches in a corporate American setting. Bosses and employees are fathers and sons; co-workers become lovers, sisters, and brothers; and evil, in the guise of society's most well-paid and seemingly happy people, is running rampant.

Dr. Neruda, calm, rational master of his discipline, is going to cure this evil. He will do it by crossing the line between therapist and inquisitor, between confidant and lover. He will do it by playing out an erotic fantasy game with a beautiful, narcissistic woman and by humiliating her sadistic father. He will do it by venturing dangerously close to his own demons: the ghosts of his living father, his dying friend, and his dead mother.

Obsessed with his cure for evil, will the man of reason see its cost?