So Dies the Dreamer
A sane, happily married man does not throw himself out of a twelfth-story window. Nor could Sarah Trafton accept the psychiatrist's monstrous theory that her husband Charles had been driven to kill himself before she could kill him. That his dreadful nightmares, his strange panic, had been caused by fear of her.

There had to be a rational reason for his suicide. To find it Sarah returned to the pheasant farm she had inherited from Charles-the farm with the brilliant fairy-tale birds which was managed by his autocratic Aunt Bess, with the help of her taciturn son Hunter, her owl-like nephew Milo, and his fluttery wife Evelyn.

These relatives warned Sarah against probing into Charles past. Even Kate Clemence who had loved Charles, and Harry Brenden who obviously liked Sarah, implied that for Charles' sake it would be better if she did not discover too much. And they were all curiously evasive about the death of Charles' beautiful stepmother Nina.