Johnny Truant, an employee in a LA tattoo parlour, finds a notebook kept by Zampano, a reclusive old man found dead in a cluttered apartment. Herein is the heavily annotated story of the Navidson Report. Will Navidson, a photojournalist, and his family move into a new house. What happens next is recorded on videotapes and in interviews.

Oedipa Maas discovers that she has been made executrix of a former lover's estate. The performance of her duties sets her on a strange trail of detection, in which bizarre characters crowd in to help or confuse her. But gradually, death, drugs, madness and marriage combine to leave Oepida in isolation.

Jack Gladney, head of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill, is afraid of death, as is his wife Babette and his colleague Murray who runs a seminar on car crashes. The author exposes our common obsession with mortality, and Jack and Babette's biggest fear - who will die first?

'A book of formidable creative intelligence, and real moral purpose' OBSERVER

The search for the mysterious V ranges from New York to Cairo to Alexandria to Malta. Apart from its strange heroine, the book's characters include sailors, spies, priests, philosophers, bums and bawds.