Alec feels that everything-his past, the rudiments of civil society, the country itself-have slipped away and now he needs to make some sense of things, and finally do something. Alec Carton, a fifty-eight-year-old jazz musician whose wife has just been shot and killed by an angry investor in the office of a financial corporation, leaves San Francisco for Brooklyn, his birthplace, after he reads a story in The Times about his cousin, Ben Gossett. Ben has also been shot by the police after depositing the frozen body of his mother on the front desk at his local Con-Ed office, her power having been turned off for nonpayment-in the middle of winter right before Christmas.