Set in the crumbling Spanish missions of nineteenth-century Baja California, this mythic novel in linked stories follows two grief-stricken people as haunted as the desolate chapels around them: a priest who caused the drowning of a native boy by compelling him to fish for pearls, and a deaf woman trying to outrun her murderous reputation as a pistolera. Though the stories span landscapes, villages, characters, and decades, the heart of the novel is Baja California itself-a stark land of cactus and creosote, of russet canyons and splintered wastes of rock-where people living in the shadow of ruined missions seek redemption on an inhospitable peninsula forsaken even by its priests.