On a rainy night in New York, Rita Hartfield vanishes from the rooms of Zahnir, a fashionable psychic known as “the dream reader.”

Her husband, Monte Hartfield—a city councilman with a public future and private doubts—has been having her followed. The report seems damning: Rita entered Zahnir’s Spring Street suite with Lucien Calvert, a man from her old theatrical life, and never came out. When the police force the locked door, they find Calvert stabbed to death behind a hidden partition.

Rita is gone.

Detective Lieutenant Daniel “Red” Halloran of the NYPD Major Case Squad takes the case, and what first appears to be a locked-room murder becomes something far stranger: an occult performance space built for deception, a missing “oracle” no one can identify, a vanished attendant, a dead man whose pockets have been emptied, and a circle of wealthy addicts whose pleasures are supplied under the cover of dreams.

Into the investigation steps Greville Carrow, a mysterious former intelligence figure known in older circles as Carrow Pasha. He seems to know too much, arrive too conveniently, and disappear too easily. Halloran distrusts him immediately—which may be the first sign that Carrow is worth trusting.

As the case leads from Park Avenue drawing rooms to private clubs, from Spring Street to the Red Hook waterfront, the truth behind Zahnir begins to emerge. Rita was not merely unfaithful, nor merely foolish. She was trapped: by addiction, by blackmail, by people who understood weakness and sold oblivion to those who could afford it.

But Calvert’s murder was not only business.

It was jealousy. Possession. Revenge.

And somewhere beneath the waterfront, Rita Hartfield is still alive.

Witty, intricate, and atmospheric, THE DREAM READER is a locked-room mystery of illusion, narcotics, obsession, and theatrical deception—where the dead man is only the first secret, and the dream reader may never have existed at all.