From our most celebrated writer of the psychological thriller comes this nerve-wracking yet eerily beautiful work of erotic obsession and madness. In the summer of 1959 Stella Raphael joins her psychiatrist husband, Max, at his new posting--a maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane. Beautiful and headstrong, Stella soon falls under the spell of Edgar Stark, a brilliant and magnetic sculptor who has been confined to the hospital for murdering his wife in a psychotic rage. But Stella's knowledge of Edgar's crime is no hindrance to the volcanic attraction that ensues--a passion that will consume Stella's sanity and destroy her and the lives of those around her. About the Author: Patrick McGrath was born in London and grew up near Broadmoor Hospital, where for many years his father was a medical superintendent. He is the author of Blood and Water and Other Tales , The Grotesque , Spider , and Dr. Haggard's Disease , and he was the co-editor, with Bradford Morrow, of The New Gothic . He lives in New York City and London and is married to the actress Maria Aitken.