Vince Corso is an adjunct professor. He was born after his mother’s one-night stand with a traveler who stopped at the hotel in Nice where she was working, and years later, when Vince gets the urge, he sends a postcard to his unknown father at the hotel’s address.To make ends meet, he has made up a profession: book therapy. When a ‘patient’ describes his or her own malaise or illness, serious or laughable, as the case may be, Vince suggests a book as treatment. When he learns that his neighbor who always greeted him on the landing has vanished, and her husband is accused of murder, Vince starts to analyze the missing women through the books she read, which a wise if solitary bookshop owner had jotted down in his records. This leads Vince to the conclusion that the woman’s disappearance is part of a book she herself is writing, one that only he can decipher.
