"J. C. Kaminer is a successful Park Avenue psychiatrist, a transplanted and still-genteel Southerner whose greatest joy in life seems to be the thrill he gets watching others. From observations of their nervous ties - for which he is handsomely paid - to the guarded peeks through curtains and screens at the private lives of the unsuspecting, Kaminer's voyeurism provides him with entertainment and enlightenment. But as he knows all too well, things are sometimes not what they first appear to be." "When Charles Manes, a rich, black basketball star, seeks Kaminer's professional help in trying to salvage his marriage to his white, unfaithful wife, Charlotte, the shrink finds himself both titillated and alarmed at the details that emerge. But the more he learns, the more he realizes that Charlotte herself is also deeply in need of help, so Kaminer convinces Marion Brockman, a colleague with whom he once had a rare dalliance, to take her on as a client." "Then Charlotte is brutally stabbed to death, and suspicion quickly falls on Manes. Kaminer is convinced, however, that his patient did not commit the murder, and with Marion's help he sets out to find the real killer. Along the way old flames are ignited and the two psychiatrists again find themselves in a relationship with which neither is quite comfortable." "Kaminer is made even more uncomfortable by the frequent visits of his mother, a woman whom he loves dearly but who is devoted to meddling in his life by playing matchmaker, and by the increasingly sordid details that he and Marion uncover in their investigation of Charlotte Manes' death - details that make Kaminer thankful that he never knew his own father and that his own mother, for all of her eccentricities, is as sane as she is."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved