Bartholomew Christian Crane is a criminal defense lawyer who wins. When he is dispatched to a small lakeside town in Northern Ontario with a brief to defend a schoolteacher accused of murdering two fourteen-year-old girls, he assumes it will be an open-and-shut case and that he'll be back carousing in Toronto before the month is out, for the girls' bodies have never been found and the Crown's evidence against the teacher is scant, the townspeople, through, remain convinced of the teacher's guilt.

Once installed in the grim honeymoon suite of the town's seedy Empire Hotel, Barth begins work on a trial that quickly deteriorates into a nightmarish tableau of psychological terror, where the distinction between dream and reality is as fine as the lines of coke he relies on for inspiration.

The deeper Barth digs into the teacher's - and the town's - past, the more disturbed and stressed the young lawyer becomes. Peculiar visions haunt his imagination; telephones ring ceaselessly in the dead of night; the gargoyles above his hotel's entrance seem to be watching him; and sometimes, out of the furthest corner of his eye - if he looks hard enough - he can see two identically dressed girls following wherever he goes...

Is his mind playing tricks on him? Of has Barth been dragged into the town's spiraling collective hysteria?

I do like a good psychological thriller, and if there's lawyering involved too, so much the better. So when I saw good reviews for this book I decided to buy it.