A portrait of a traditional Brahmin family on the brink of dissolution. Tara, the narrator, divorced from the husband she wed in an arranged marriage and transplanted to San Francisco, teeters between the India she left behind and the dizzying California she now calls home. Though separated by geography and by radically different lifestyles, Tara and her sisters - the desirable daughters' of the title - remain close, and when danger befalls Tara, it is her sisters and her ex-husband she turns to for help in resolving the mystery that threatens to destroy her and her family.'