It was a dark day for Marisa Larkin when she heard her mother's voice. Not that she didn't love her mother, of course she did, but Chloe Larkin had died six years before; which meant Marisa had lived six years without listening to her, without seeing her, without sharing the day with her! But then, suddenly and surprisingly she was back, along with Uncle Ralph and an old neighbor from Squirrel Hill. The three of them together in her head: chatting, arguing, screaming; stamping the turf of her mind as their own! Was it a bad dream, or far worse than that, a real nightmare?

On another dark day, a year and a half before and thousands of miles from Pittsburgh, a Mexican walks into a shop and has his face tattooed before he kidnaps the first of the eleven women he will take back to an oven in a disused ironworks that is now part of a municipal park in Monterrey. Marisa will be the eleventh of those women on a trip she makes to Mexico after her first psychotic episode.