Marielle Wing is a highly popular literary novelist whose triumphs on the page are matched only by her failures in finding and loving another woman. At JFK airport, she encounters a terrorist bombing; rather than running, she begins snapping photos and this brings her to the attention of Homeland Security, who insists she enter the Witness Security Program. Denied her vibrant Los Angeles life, banished to a dreary suburb of Detroit with only her cat, Dude, Marielle convinces herself that her identity shift will be temporary—and she imagines resurfacing with a blockbuster book. But once she reads her own obituary in The New York Times, she feels stripped of everything she values and utterly alone.
Weeks later, she reads that a new novel, purportedly penned by her, is going to be published "posthumously"; enraged, she breaks the rules of secrecy to find out who's behind this fraud and shatters the security of her whereabouts. Unsure whether it's terrorists or the government after her, she runs for her life, and must turn to unlikely sources for help—a dreadlocked musician named Tuna (who she finds devastatingly attractive despite being much too young); two aggressively loving and genial Buddhist monks; and her former lover and still best friend, Fresh. With their help she fights to reclaim her life.