A heroine with a guilty secret that she finds hard to live with, a brooding anti-hero with an all-consuming passion for elegant revenge on those who made his early life a misery, an immaculate homecoming queen whose life is made torture by the very youth she despises most. Separate strands of time and fate gradually tighten around the hapless characters of Nowicki's dark and tortuous novel in a mesh of sex, mysticism and vengeance.