"The Hugos have run Hugo Creek for thirty years, and that boy's been rotten to the core for almost as long."

At a solitary farm out on the plains of Texas, south of Abilene, a posse led by Rollie Hugo inflicts a shocking act of violence on the Haney family. The matriarch of the Haneys -what's left of them- is Alice: she's in her fifties, a first-generation Chinese immigrant. She soon finds that justice is not going to be easy to come by, and so she sets out alone on a bloody path to vengeance.
What she finds in Hugo Creek is a fiefdom cut off from the world. Where deserters have their hearts ripped out, and the eviscerations are attributed to a ghostly figure that walks the mining camp at night. To have any hope of avenging her murdered husband, Alice must break the fearful spell -or shatter the clever illusion- that binds the town. And that means first unraveling the mystery of the Bleeding Woman...