A widowed young woman, her leg broken during an abusive, sexually charged incident with her brutal second husband, attends a child's birthday party at a seedy indoor play rink. A retired cop can't stop fixing a brain-damaged war vet's problems. The Critical List tangles with fraying family ties, while anticipating disasters about to erupt on what Wenke calls "the post-contemporary tundra." In this world, people teeter on the edge—a former jailbird under house arrest; a would-be teenage parricide; a former philosophy professor, now homeless, mind blown, living in the subway underground.