Turner Raines is Mr Heartbreak. Everybody leaves him. They walk out, they run away. they die. When his oldest friend Mel Kissing dies with an ice pick through his skull, Raines picks up the thread and sets out to ask 'who?' and 'why?' But this is America in 1969 and one death is just a drop in the ocean. The USA is about to land a man on the moon and the Vietnam War is ripping the country to pieces, setting sons against fathers, fathers against sons. The Woodstock festival is in full swing and Norman Mailer is standing as candidate for Mayor of New York. Against this backdrop, Raines' questions take him back to the childhood home he left in Texas, back to the battered remains of his youth. and as his memory unravels, America unravels with it.