Ava Varazo, a beautiful woman from a small village in Mexico, works in a brothel in the border town of La Paz, Arizona. When one of her customers, DelRay Mudo, a motorcycle mechanic from Guadelupe, falls in love with her, Ava seizes the chance to change her life. Indio Desacato, a rich racketeer from Sinaloa, Texas, is enamored of Ava and has asked her to be the queen of his own house. Desacato, Ava tells DelRay, brags that he never keeps less than half a million dollars, in cash, at his mansion.

DelRay, whose own future holds no great promise outside of Ava, agrees to go to Sinaloa with her. They kill Desacato together, but Ava abandons DelRay -- as she had planned all along -- and disappears with the loot. DelRay tracks her down to her home in Mexico, but Ava is no longer the woman she was in La Paz, and DelRay finds himself unexpectedly caught between a campesino revolution and a pair of assassins. Expertly shifting between the tender and the terrifying, Barry Gifford has written a book that leaves both our nerves, and our minds, on an electrifying edge.