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Mired in a pit of depression so deep that he doubts he'll ever pull himself out, Matt Hoveling finds himself pushed up against the farthest edge of the North American continent possible, where a group of marginalised Vancouverites take him in as one of their own as they work to improve their own lives and the city around them. (345 pages) ------------- "What is wrong with you people?" Naz demanded to know. "How the hell did you win the Cold War? Cops like that are like shark's teeth. Break one off and another will just grow in its place. Stop acting like Rocky and Bullwinkle. Let Natasha - Where is my Boris? Why don't I have a Boris? - do the thinking for you. The solution is simple; you have a disappeared woman you want back. This Jewish Effie. You have a bad cop you want disappeared. The so-called Detective Dick. The answer is simple. Switch them. Disappear the cop, bring back Effie. Paint the town black." "What do you mean, 'Paint the town black?'" "Simple. I'm from Kazakhstan. Bad men have been making people disappear into Kazakhstan since Alexander Nevsky and his grandson, Ivan Kalita - 'little moneybags' -- bribed the Mongols' Golden Horde to leave Moscow alone and focus on rape, pillage and beheadings in Kazakhstan."Ivan the Terrible, Vasily the Dark, Stalin: they all sent their problems to disappear and die in Kazakhstan. There's only one solution when shits like your cop stain society so badly they can't be erased. You can never make it pure and white again. But that doesn't mean you can't do anything to start over. All you have to do is start from the other direction. Paint the whole thing black. You can paint over black just as well as you can paint over white."

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.---------------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.