The year is 1934, and Bena Duse Jonssen, the midwestern wife of a doctor, and young mother of a newborn, has an outwardly comfortable existence unaffected by the Great Depression. But she is plagued with superstitious ritual and the buried remnants of a tragic girlhood, and when she and her husband move to Pueblo, Colorado - a withering mining town afflicted by dust storms and social extremes of wealth and poverty - her life begins to unravel. Nothing can thrive in the bleak environment, not Bena and Ted's marriage, and not their baby, who Bena believes, despite her husband's constant assurances, is in failing health.
To distract herself, Bena accepts a part-time position as a society reporter for the local paper, following the activities of the town's elite club women - women such as Reimer Lee Jackson, with her plans to restore a crumbling monument to the mining industry, the Mineral Palace, to its former grandeur. Soon Bena finds herself drawn to the seamier side of Pueblo, to a run-down saloon, where she befriends Red Grissom, a taciturn rancher, and to the lurid halls of a rooming house, where she encounters a pregnant prostitute, Maude Hewitt. The question of the unborn baby's paternity leads Bena to uncover not only the sexual corruption on which an entire town is founded, but also the lies that enclose her own marriage and her role as mother. As the two women's lives converge, in ways that shock, Bena is compelled to return to the decaying architecture of the Mineral Palace. Here she is forced to confront her most terrifying secret, and struggle with the dark intersection between love and destruction.