When Honor Gillette's four-year-old daughter, Emily, informs her that a sick man is lying in their front yard, Honor rushes out to help him. But the "sick man turns out to be Lee Coburn, accused of murdering seven men in cold blood the night before. Dangerous, desperate, and armed, he promises Honor that she and her daughter won't be hurt as long as she does everything he asks. She has no choice but to accept him at his word. But everything changes...

"1907: In a sanatorium in Temperley, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, Doctor Quintana falls in love with Men©♭ndez, the head nurse--of whom he knows almost nothing, not even her first name. Motivated by this love--which he shares with his colleagues--by money, and by the promise of transcendence, he carries out a cruel and misguided experiment that investigates the threshold between life and death. The premise is that a human head stays alive...

Amid the turbulent atmosphere of the late 1960s, Harriet and David Lovatt manage to keep their family safely detached from outside turmoil--until the birth of their fifth child, who is abnormally strong, demanding, even violent.

As a boy, William Bellman commits one small, cruel act: killing a bird with his slingshot. Little does he know the unforeseen and terrible consequences of the deed, which is soon forgotten amidst the riot of boyhood games. By the time he is grown, with a wife and children of his own, William seems to be a man blessed by fortune, until tragedy strikes and the stranger in black comes. Then he starts to wonder if all his happiness is about to be eclipsed....