Arizona, 1948. Novelist François Combe has taken up residence with his wife, his son, and his mistress in the strange no man's land of the Santa Cruz Valley. His imagination is sparked by the surrounding desert, its ghost towns, and other vestiges of the pioneer past. The present, too, draws him in, especially in the border town of Nogales, where luxury and lust come together against a backdrop of misery and servitude... and where games of the flesh are paid for in blood. Sometimes the grass isn't always greener on the other side of the border.