In 1909, Sigmund Freud, accompanied by his then disciple Carl Jung, made his one and only visit to the United States, to deliver a series of lectures on psychoanalysis at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. The honorary doctoral degree that Clark awarded him was the first public recognition Freud had ever received for his work. Despite the great success of this visit, Freud always spoke, in later years, as if some trauma had befallen him in the United States.

The Interpretation of Murder opens on a hot summer night in 909 as Sigmund Freud disembarks in New York from a teamship. With Freud is his rival Carl Jung; waiting for him on the docks is a young physician named Stratham Younger, one of Freud's most devoted American supporters. So begins this story of what will be the great genius's first and last--journey to America.

The morning after his arrival, a beautiful young woman is found dead in an apartment in one of the city's grand new skyscrapers, the Balmoral. The next day brings a similar crime in a townhouse on Gramercy Park. Only this time the young heiress,Nora Acton, escapes with her life but with no memory of the attack. Asked to conslt-on-the case, Dr. Younger calls on Freud to guide him through the girl's analysis. Their investigation, and the pursuit of the culprit, lead throughout New York, from the luxurious ballrooms of the Waldorf-Astoria, to the skyscrapers rising on seemingly every street corner, to the bottom of the East River, where laborers dig through the silt to build the foundation of the Manhattan Bridge.