Nana Underhill’s intoxicated plan to run Lily over with her car seemed like a good idea at the time. Having slept with Lily’s husband Mark, she needed to ease her guilt with an act of kindness – -however bizarre. The accident would bring Lily’s husband racing to the scene and back into Lily’s affections. But when Mark fails to show up as planned, the staged accident backfires and Nana has to pull Lily from a pool of blood and take her to hospital herself. Then Daryl, the husband of their eccentric friend Alice — who spends afternoons sitting on the front porch with her mannequin Delane – -finds a severed hand in the middle of a rural Ontario highway. He scrapes it off the road with a snow brush and puts it in a cereal box for safekeeping.

Who the severed hand belongs to is only the first challenge for small-town detective Harris Cool. Why the hand was severed in the first place sends him on a chilling journey into the complexities of one woman’s tortured past. Only when Detective Cool confronts his own demons — and when Lily’s crazy mother Carol reveals hers — do Nana and Lily come to the startling truth about their own fractious relationship.