After eleven-year-old Zitlally's father is deported to Mexico, she takes refuge in her trailer park's forest of rusted car parts, where she befriends a spunky neighbor and finds a stray dog that she nurses back to health and believes she must keep safe so that her father will return.

High school senior and science whiz Nearly Boswell, called Leigh, is thrilled when she gets an internship in a forensic science lab, since it is a step toward college and a way out of the trailer park--but soon she finds herself the target of a serial killer, one who seems to know a lot about the residents of Sunny View Trailer Park as well as her absent father's secrets.

When people start vanishing from a godforsaken trailer park next to the Folsom Energy Plant, two eleven-year-olds investigate using mathematical clues that were hastily planted by their friend Mrs. Clarke before she disappeared.