A literary mystery – antic and amusing, refreshingly profane, elaborately staged, compulsively  readable

Corrupted Humours opens with the explosion of Albert Snaedeker on the operating table during  routine surgery. The deceased’s cousin, an oil heir and publisher of Angle magazine, assigns his reporter and sometime novelist, Owen Berk, to investigate.  

Berk not only pursues the whodunnit,/howdunnit questions but, intrigued by the bizarre death and the people surrounding it, transforms them into characters in a novel. In the story, Snaedeker's surgeon's depressed wife is indoctrinated into the world of S/M and has an imagined flowering. Berk's novel is woven into the framing narrative until the plots converge as Berk falls in love with the woman, wondering how much of his passion is for her, how much for the fantasy figure he has turned her into.