The story of Michael, a professor of Comparative Literature who is beginning to suspect that his wife, Christine, an ex-student some 20 years his junior, is harboring dark secrets about her past.
To uncover these secrets, he teams up with Christine's psychologist, and the two use deception to find out about her mysterious past, which is personified by her even more mysterious father, whose ghost-like presence is felt throughout the novel. In the climactic scene of Lovers Living, Lovers Dead, Michael raids his wife's secret hope chest, finding out that Christine's "wild stories" about her father's trips to Africa and the Far East, where he consorted with "witch doctors" and tribal chieftains, were not tales after all, but realities. He finds millions in Swiss bank accounts, and pornographic pictures of his wife being molested as a child (so that she could not be sacrificed as a virgin). As it turns out, Christine's father struck a deal with the devil as it were, one in which he delivered his daughter's soul in order to save her from becoming a human sacrifice.
