Evan Neverever is on the run. He just isn't sure if anyone is chasing him. So he drives further west from D.C. every day and by night he waits in generic hotel rooms for someone to kick his door in. He kills time by writing out his story on a stolen typewriter. It's the story of unraveling Zoe Calypso's true role in the tragic life of her protege, Lena Pavlovna. Lena's a 22-year-old owner of a resurgent art gallery who saw her father murdered at 14, lost her best friend at 18 and never really had a mother. Evan's running now that he has solved the mysteries of her life by using his otherworldly talent. A talent he's so reluctant to describe that he doesn't even like to do it on paper, alone, in a random East Texas hotel room.

Since witnessing her father’s murder in their Capitol Hill home at the age of 14, Lena Pavlovna, 22, had only trusted her father’s colleague, Zoe Calypso, and her own best friend, Thena. Then, Thena died, too, in a suspicious car crash, and it was down to Zoe, the famous artist and art purveyor. When the novel begins, Zoe has hired the heavily indebted Evan Neverever to be her errand boy and fence. She introduces him to Lena, and he, in turn, pulls her out of fist fights and reveals his secret talent, a kind of textual ESP, to the younger woman. Her guard lowered for the first time that she can remember, Lena charges him with solving the most vexing mystery of her troubled life: why is her best friend dead? In pursuing an answer, Evan forces her to face a new side of her late father and the real monster behind his death.