One hot summer afternoon a quarter century ago, a wealthy socialite and her young lover were gunned down in a cheap motel room on the outskirts of the Midwestern city of Calista. Forensic sketch-artist David Weiss has been haunted by the notoriously unsolved double murder since boyhood. Returning to his hometown to cover a routine murder trial, David instead becomes obsessed, like his psychoanalyst father before him, with one of the victims of that long-ago crime, the beautiful but tragic Barbara Fulraine. David"s father believed that if he could unlock Barbara"s troubling, recurring nightmare -- "the dream of the broken horses" -- his solution would mark a watershed in his career. But as David seeks to reassemble the face of her killer, he finds that with each stroke of his pencil he is being hurled down a path of ever-darkening mystery, obsession, and dread.