Deirdre is a first-year female engineering student at Aquitaine, who takes a Women's Studies course as an elective. Marin, a student at Cantech, ponders what it means to be a female engineering student in such a chilly gendered climate. Jenean, a francophone female journalist working in both languages, is feisty and urbane, a feminist who longs for peace between the sexes even as she ponders splitting from her live-in partner. She finds herself on a killer's target list of 19 women. Set in a tragic historic moment, on two college campuses fraught with gendered antagonisms, this novel bears witness to the infamous "Montreal Massacre," when, on December 6, 1989, fourteen female engineering students were murdered in their classrooms. Through the braided narratives of these three women as they happen headlong into the tragedy, this novel examines the enduring effects of the massacre's 24 minutes of inarticulate inhumanity.