A small band of friends inhabiting the margins of Vancouver society go about their lives, helping each other cope with the trials that come with living in a city that doesn't seem have much room for them.

Book 2 has the group combing the city for the indigenous niece of one of their band. She has run away from her northern community to the city, where not one but two serial killers prey on young indigenous women.

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Go had made a mistake. She knew that now. She couldn't figure out the city, what people were doing, how they lived. Was what they were doing called living? For the first time since leaving Q'umk'uts, doubts were creeping in. Whole layers that were missing. It was like trying to listen to a Canucks hockey game through the static on the radio being broadcast 700 kilometres and three mountain ranges away. Life had let her run like a Chinook salmon for seventeen years, playing her, tiring her out, before it jerked the line tight and set the hook. It seemed that everyone else had come into the world with a set of instructions but her. She felt like she was wearing moose-gut snowshoes and everyone else had ballet slippers on.

She had no idea what to do here; she felt like a hotheaded Katniss Everdeen in a Hunger Games book she had read and discarded in grade school. As the bus made its way through Vancouver's streets, she took every STOP sign on the street as advice to go home.