A photographer, Abner Cray, goes to NYC to work on a "coffee table photo book" about Manhattan and encounters, in the apartment he's renting, not only a woman, Phyllis Pellaprat, with whom he falls in love, and finds out halfway through the novel not only that she's dead but that the absent friend whose apartment he's using murdered her. Beyond that, he's been given the doubtful gift of "seeing" and interacting with hundreds of spirits that inhabit Manhattan.