"Some of It Was Real" is the latest novel by Hood River author Nan Fischer.

I once heard literary critic Sven Birkerts talk about “the afterlife of reading,” a phrase that perfectly describes the way that books — their plots, or characters, or maybe a memorable turn of phrase — can come to roost in one’s brain.

In such a manner, I’ve been haunted recently by “Some of It Was Real,” the latest novel by Hood River author Nan Fischer. This story is a mesmerizing cat-and-mouse mystery, told from two different points of view in alternating chapters.

This week’s book

“Some of It Was Real” by Nan Fischer

Berkley — 352 pp — $17

Sylvie Young is a young psychic-medium whose agent, Lucas, has been helping her build a following on the club circuit — she’s concocted a program that includes sharing the story of how she discovered she had these preternatural abilities, connecting her audience members with long-dead loved ones, and always bringing her support animal with her onstage.

Moose is a giant black dog whose calming presence, she suggests to her audience, keeps her from having stage fright. But that isn’t the half of it. Sylvie suffers from debilitating panic attacks — frightening scraps of memories that well up at inconvenient moments and paralyze her with fear unless she can keep them suppressed.

Now Lucas has her lined up for a limited-run television show of her own. But is the pressure more than Sylvie can stand? And will stardom force some of her painful secrets out of the closet – the fact that she is estranged from her adoptive family, for instance, or that a plane crash killed her parents?

Adding to her stress is the appearance of an investigative reporter from the Los Angeles Times at one of her shows, Thomas Holmes, who tells Sylvie that he is writing a piece that will reveal that she is a “grief vampire” — a fraud who preys upon people’s vulnerabilities.

Thomas is trying to make a comeback after committing a major reporting gaffe on another story. This may be his only chance to resurrect his floundering career, and he is further motivated by the fact that his own mom, a grief-stricken widow, has been virtually bankrupted by quacks promising to help her get in touch with her lost loved ones.

Readers may need to suspend disbelief in the turn of events that lands both Sylvie and Thomas on the same Portland-bound run of the Amtrak Coast Starlight.

But once psychic and reporter and dog and — oh, a sick cat — settle in for the long ride north, the plot twists become more and more intriguing.

And once Sylvie and Thomas arrive in Oregon, their attempts to prove their own sides of the story lead them from an Eastern Oregon pear orchard to a memory care nursing facility in Tillamook. And that story persists in becoming more instead of less complicated.

On top of doing a wonderful job of scene-setting, Fischer develops two compelling characters, both of whom have to grapple with issues of attachment and trust, and end up investigating identity to transcend trauma.

“Some of It Was Real” is a page turner, one to stay up late at night to finish.