In this yarn, Carl takes a long walk on the dark side and returns to his would-be alma mater, Harvard Law School; a place from which he was unceremoniously expelled over 25 years before.
It all begins when unsuspectingly and just for kicks, Carl attends a Harvard alumni banquet at the Los Angeles Biltmore. During the festivities, a very classy, old gentile Angelena (Mrs. James Lundquist AKA Mrs. L) strolls up to the keynote speaker (a Nobel laureate psychiatry professor from Harvard) and accuses him of murder.
Against all solicited and unsolicited advice, Carl takes on the septuagenarian schicksa’s case and travels back to his old stomping grounds of Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts to investigate the demise of Mrs. L’s son; a PhD candidate in psychology and student of the good Doctor David J. Baranofsky. As an adversary, the Doctor is a triple threat: an expert in hypnosis, psychopharmacology and dream interpretation. Plus, this research cash cow has more heavy hitters and spin doctors protecting him than Cher did after she divorced Greg Allman for a second time.
Choosing to go undercover as Jerry Golden, Carl takes on the labyrinthine power structures and players of what locals call “The Crimson Cult” AKA Harvard University, only to discover the obvious; he is the odd man out… way out. Carl winds up so far out in fact that when he finally returns to his City of the Queen of the Angels; there are significant parts of his psyche mangled or missing in action.