The young hero of Emmanuel Carrere's best-selling novel is little Nicolas, whose school ski outing seems doomed from the start. First, his father (a traveling prosthesis salesman) refuses to let Nicolas take the school bus with the rest of his class because of a recent tragedy in which a number of children burned to death.

Then, to make matters worse, he drops off Nicolas but forgets to take his son's suitcase out of the trunk, reducing Nicolas to begging the other children for such bare essentials as a toothbrush and pajamas (a source of particular tension since Nicolas is still accident-prone at night).

Faithful to the strict logic that governs a child's mind, Carrere recounts Nicolas's feverish fantasies stoked by the lurid tales of kidnapping and organ theft he has been told by his father. The fantasies grow frighteningly real when a child from the local village disappears. Sure that the child has fallen victim to one of the organ bandits his father always warns him about, Nicolas convinces a classmate to help him investigate the matter in the best heroic school-boy style.

But in this wrenching novel, the fantasy of two young boys fearlessly braving dangers to capture the bad guys gives way to a much simpler, more sinister, more devastating reality.