The last volume in this trilogy, and it's as weird and unexplainable as the first. An unpublished writer disappears, and his wife contacts an old friend of the disappeared man, asking him to take over her husband's literary effects. As with the rest of the volumes in this series, obsession quickly follows. The absent Fanshawe looms larger and larger in his friend's mind, and the two begin to merge, almost, into a single undermined entity. Fanshawe's actions are never entirely explained - even when he tries to justify himself, it's confused and unconvincing - and I'm left feeling that the two men are never quite stable, or even sane... that each has compromised his identity in ways that can never really be remediated. It's all very odd, and yet the slow collusion, the continued compromises between them, begin to be actually understandable. That's genuinely and effectively disturbing, and if the book leaves me baffled, I'm interested and baffled, which is something.