While investigating his mentor's life and death, Michael, a voyeuristic fashion photographer, travels through a Dionysian landscape where sex is daydream, women and horses share the same erotic power, and perversity is the rule. An inventive mix of biography, history, erotica, and classic whodunit, and "Whistlejacket and " is John Hawkes at his best as he blurs distinctions between death and desire, image and language, art and morality.