After escaping from the scene of a shooting at a Blues club in Chicago that she instigated, Cressid seeks haven in Panajachel, a bohemian tourist town on the shore of Lake Atitlan in Guatemala. She ends up working for a German artist who believes he is the Antichrist. Within the insular world of the artist's megalomaniacal fantasies, the civil war raging in the highlands seems a world away, yet a love affair draws her into a confluence of high art, drugs and religious fanaticism that underlies the political conflict.