Professor Anthony Landau, renowned epidemiologist, returns to his home in the Berkeley Hills to find a woman, a former scientific colleague, naked and quite dead in his bed. Her death sets in motion a chain of events-and murders-that will have the locals terrified, UC Berkeley's academics pointing fingers, the cops under pressure to solve the crimes, the tabloid press crying for blood, and Landau as everyone's number-one pick for serial killer of the year. Robert Roper, the author of THE SAVAGE PROFESSOR, has been called, "an authentic American voice" (Newsweek) and "a major talent, clearly a master of disguises and the telling detail, a writer with a clear but perfectly eccentric vision" (USA Today). Of his previous book THE TRESPASSERS, The New Yorker wrote: "A novel about the regenerative potential of sexual passion . . . an exquisite novel that explores the dream states of pleasure with a captivating assurance."