Four literary critics converge on a vanished German novelist, their search leading them to Santa Teresa, a city on the Mexican border where hundreds of women have been murdered and the killings will not stop. Roberto Bolaño left this novel unfinished at his death in 2003, and its five parts spiral from literature into violence, from academic conferences into desert where bodies are found in ditches, catalogued with forensic, unbearable precision. It asks what literature can do in the face of atrocity and offers no reassurance. Its pages hold boxing matches, lunatic asylums, Eastern Front battles, and always the murdered women of Santa Teresa, the wound that will not close. It stares into the abyss until the abyss looks away.