In Timm Rautert’s book Der Traum des Em three narrative strands come together: crime novel, science fiction and photo-narrative. It is a dystopian project about an avatar tasked with solving a long-past crime in which three fellows at the Villa Massimo in Rome died in mysterious circumstances. The avatar is the most elaborate form of its species, a so-called “Em.” The images show the artworks of the three victims—the painter Sylvia K., the sculptor Georg H., the photographer Franz G.—and the crime scenes within the Massimo complex. The book plays on the discrepancy between the fictionality of the text and the apparent reality of the images: a playful, suspenseful, cross-genre exploration of the medium.