Joanie Mucherino, whose husband suddenly abandoned her and her eleven-year-old son, Todd, is trying to cope while dealing with her comically tactless and intrusive Italian family. To complicate matters, Joanie is now "available" in the eyes of Bruno Minea, a family friend whose twenty-year passion for her has been unwavering and faintly frightening.

All of these relationships are transformed when Joanie and Todd kill an acquaintance in a hit-and-run accident and then discover - step by step, to their horror - that they will keep their act a secret.

It soon becomes clear to Joanie and Todd that they have, through this accident and the chain of events in its aftermath, connected themselves to something thoroughly sinister. What follows brings into focus intense conflicts as large as those between religion and individual responsibility and as particular as those between mother and son.

Joanie is forced to reassess her capacity for wrongdoing and, most important, forced to see that she is capable of being the architect of her son's own anguished guilt and silence. In his most spare and suspenseful novel, Jim Shepard brilliantly chronicles one woman's irreparable position, confronting us with the most disastrous inclinations of the human heart