Lamenting the passing of the golden age of detection, Thackeray Phin, a plus-foured drop-out from an American university, has condescended to investigate the supernatural until something more sinister comes along. "Drug Victim's Ghost Warns Pop Star at London Commune Séance" — the eerie headline attracts Phin to the headquarters of a spiritualist group. When Doc Lauderdale, the drug victim's father, mysteriously disappears from behind a locked bathroom door, the rest of the group rejoices at his achievement in "astral projection." But the impalement of a pop star on garden railings (a nasty accident after an experiment in levitation), and a further series of ghoulish occurrences, convince the amateur sleuth that he is on the trail of as tangled a web of fraud and duplicity as his hero Sherlock Holmes ever set out to unravel.

With the aid of Beeker, the con man who claims to "know how it's done," Phin draws up a list of suspects: Viola Webb, the expensive medium who can see the black aura of impending death; Dank, the retired Wing-Commander addicted to bottled spirits; the Revered Stonehouse, oddly connected with the chapel at the funeral parlor; Professor Hackel, the distinguished but doubting psychologist. Is one of them the perpetrator of minor mysteries or a master crime? The curse of an Egyptian amulet, strange doings in a dark séance parlor, lurking death in an orgone box, psychic poison and live burial — John Sladek's taut brainteaser fairly creeps with fiendish happenings.

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Thackeray Phin, the delightfully eccentric American university philosopher turned detective, is attracted to the headquarters of a spiritualistic group. When a rock star is killed after trying to levitate from a fourth story window, and another member disappears from behind a locked door while demonstrating astral projection, Phin begins to suspect that the members of the society may be involved in something far blacker than séances.