A dazzling literary thriller — the story of Sigmund Freud assisting a Manhattan murder investigation. ”The Interpretation Of Murder” is an inventive tour de force inspired by Sigmund Freud's 1909 visit to America, accompanied by protégé and rival Carl Jung. When a wealthy young debutante is discovered bound, whipped and strangled in a luxurious apartment overlooking the city, and another society beauty narrowly escapes the same fate, the mayor of New York calls upon Freud to use his revolutionary new ideas to help the surviving victim recover her memory of the attack, and solve the crime. But nothing about the attacks — or about the surviving victim, Nora — is quite as it seems. And there are those in very high places determined to stop the truth coming out, and Freud's startling theories taking root on American soil.

«Inspired by Sigmund Freud's only, traumatic visit to America (a society of savages, he was to claim), Jed Rubenfeld's novel is an intricate tale of murder and the mind's dangerous mysteries. On a sweltering August evening in 1909 Freud disembarks from a steamship in New York City, accompanied by his protégé and rival Carl Jung. Across town, a debutante is found dangling from a chandelier, whipped, mutilated, and strangled. The next day, a second beauty—a rebellious heiress—barely escapes the killer, but is hysterical and can remember nothing. American Freudian Stratham Younger calls on his idol to analyze the spirited girl. «As The Interpretation of Murder races past ravished damsels, sinister aristocrats, architectural marvels (the building of the Manhattan Bridge), hysterical symptoms, a Hamlet-Freud nexus and downright criminal wordplay ('there are more things in heaven and earth, Herr Professor, than are dreamt in your psychology'; 'sometimes a catarrh, I’m afraid, is only a catarrh'), it cobbles together its own brand of excitement. That excitement is as palpable as it is peculiar».»