Bart Nowicki, plumber, fifty-four, comes out to Sunset Village to fix a tap, eats three bowls of Clara Montague's soup, and doesn't leave. His truck sits in the lot for four days with the keys in it. Nobody makes a phone call, because Sunset Village is six weeks from a state review and everyone here has a reason to keep the week quiet.
 
Enter Detective Frank Mills — tired, decent, thirty-one years in, and looking for one missing man. He is handed a brochure, a guest cottage, and a bowl of stew, and he cheerfully surrenders his car keys. Everyone he interviews tells him the truth. Clara says she killed eight people. Jenny says she poisoned the critics. Julio confesses to sixteen murders in a crowded room. Frank hears all of it as charm, eccentricity, and metaphor, because the alternative is unthinkable, and because nobody has been this kind to him since his wife died eleven years ago.
 
He is a good detective. He is right about nearly everything. But the line goes down, the road is twelve miles long, and there is a gate — and somewhere behind a pair of gaudy floral curtains, someone has already decided how his case ends.