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“Nobody in this room has a good memory,” August Voss said, and four hundred dinner guests looked up from their coffee at a stranger they had not been told was coming.

August Voss walks into a corporate anniversary dinner nobody told the room was coming, and ninety minutes later four hundred people believe he knows things he cannot possibly know. He does not. There is a method under every effect, and it is exact, and it is legal, and it is his.

Then the method works too well. A live television booking. A phone that rings on air. A woman in seat 14C. Daniel Mercer, a physicist who has spent a career taking men like Voss apart, publishes the whole apparatus with the video to prove it. Voss does not deny a word of it. That is the first thing that should worry you.

What follows is not an unmasking. It is a man discovering how much of a life you can read correctly and still lose: a manager who has carried him for four years, a Vegas residency, and one last envelope in a small clear box hanging forty-one feet above a sold-out house. No gift. No ghosts. A watch on the left wrist, checked constantly, and a door he does not see coming.