One hot summer afternoon a quarter century ago, a wealthy socialite and her young lover were gunned down in a cheap motel room on the outskirts of the Midwestern city of Calista.

Forensic sketch-artist David Weiss has been haunted by the notoriously unsolved double murder since boyhood. Returning to his hometown to cover a routine murder trial, David instead becomes obsessed, like his psychoanalyst father before him, with one of the victims of that long-ago crime, the beautiful but tragic Barbara Fulraine. David's father believed that if he could unlock Barbara's troubling, recurring nightmare -- "the dream of the broken horses" -- his solution would mark a watershed in his career. But as David seeks to reassemble the face of her killer, he finds that with each stroke of his pencil he is being hurled down a path of ever-darkening mystery, obsession, and dread.

Amazon.com Review
Penzler Pick, March 2002: Among William Bayer's remarkable novels, many involve the sense of sight--the way in which we see things. Under the pseudonym David Hunt, for example, he wrote The Magician's Tale and Trick of Light, both of which feature a colorblind photographer. Now again using his own name, Bayer delves once more into the realm of the senses.

David Weiss, like his creator, is a talented courtroom sketch artist. David has returned to his hometown in the Midwest to cover the trial of a performance artist accused of killing her rock-star lover. The national media are there and soon David becomes involved with the female reporter for CNN. As fascinated as he is with the trial and with his new romance, it is an earlier murder in this town that he obsesses about. When David was a boy, the socialite mother of one of his school friends was gunned down in a motel room with her lover. Barbara Fulraine already had known tragedy when her daughter was abducted and murdered several years before. In addition, the young lover gunned down with her was David's tennis teacher. It is the stuff of young boys' fantasies.

But David has an even closer connection: His father, a therapist, was treating Barbara Fulraine for her depression when she was murdered. David's father felt he could help Mrs. Fulraine if only he could unlock her recurring nightmare, a dream about broken horses. But Barbara died before he could do it and, soon afterwards, David's father committed suicide. The gunman, although glimpsed by several people, was never identified.

As an adult, David realizes that he saw all these events through an impressionable boy's eyes. Now he wants to reexamine that case through his adult eyes and discover who gunned down that couple in the motel room. Using his father's notes and taking time out from the trial to interview people who lived in the town at the time, David sketches the memories he digs up until a picture begins to emerge, a picture that may well put David's life in danger if the murderer is still living in the town.

Bayer's talent as a writer and a storyteller is extraordinary. He manages to convey the media circus surrounding the current trial (which has a surprising outcome) with the quiet stillness of a story that has remained buried just beneath the surface of the town's history for many years. --Otto Penzler