The eagerly awaited third novel in the Max Liebermann series — literature’s first psychoanalytic detective — is about sex, the will to power and deception.

Vienna, 1903. In the rambling hillside edifice that is St. Florian’s military school, a young cadet is found dead, his body lacerated with razor wounds. Once again, Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt calls on his friend — and disciple of Freud — Doctor Max Liebermann, to help him investigate.

In the closed society of the school, power is everything, and suspicion falls on an elite group of cadets with a penchant for sadism and dangerous games. When it is discovered that the dead boy was a frequent guest of the deputy headmaster’s attractive wife, other motives for murder suggest themselves.

A tangled web of relationships and dark secrets is uncovered, which Liebermann, using new psychoanalytic tools such as dream interpretation and the ink-blot test, begins to probe. At the same time, he finds himself romantically involved with a mysterious Hungarian concert violinist, Trezska Novak, a woman gifted with uncannily accurate intuitions. Again, all is not what it seems, and Liebermann is drawn into the perilous world of espionage. The choices he is forced to make will threaten the entire stability of the Habsburg Empire.