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.