The novel's hero is Akhenaton, Pharaoh of Egypt's Eighteenth Dynasty, who was the first ruler to introduce the idea of monotheism. As Rosemary Sullivan remarks in her biography of MacEwen, he was, like Julian, ''one more human being filled with the god-lust.'' Akhenaton's single-mindedness in his quest for his own brand of reason is a powerfully paradoxical distillation of the artistic temperament: originality, fertility and beauty set against death and despair and an inability to love. He's jolted out of his torpor by his student Susan Slater who experiences a sequence of paranormal visitations from a man named Gabriel at the Dancing Grasses conservancy. Could this be the same Gabriel, the charismatic shaman, whose spell Dexter fell under at seventeen? Why is he reappearing at Dancing Grasses, and why has he led Dexter and Susan to a corpse?