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Four European literary critics, obsessed with a reclusive and possibly mythical German novelist named Benno von Archimboldi, follow rumors of his presence to Santa Teresa, a fictional stand in for the real Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez, where hundreds of women have been murdered without any arrest that satisfies the evidence. Bolano builds the novel out of five loosely connected parts rather than one continuous plot: the critics' own tangled love lives and academic rivalries; a Chilean professor named Amalfitano slowly losing his grip on reality after moving to Santa Teresa with his daughter; an American journalist, Oscar Fate, sent to cover a boxing match who gets pulled into the same murders; a vast, deliberately exhausting, near clinical catalogue of the murdered women's bodies as they are found across roughly five years; and finally the life of Hans Reiter, a German soldier on the eastern front during the Second World War who survives and becomes the novelist Archimboldi under an assumed name. The threads converge only obliquely: Archimboldi's own nephew, it emerges, is a suspect held for the killings, though the novel refuses to resolve who is actually responsible for the murders it has spent hundreds of pages documenting.

Bolano borrows the flat, procedural language of a forensic report for the murder section specifically, a choice that makes the violence harder to look away from rather than easier, and the novel as a whole reads as bleak, sprawling and deliberately unresolved, running over eleven hundred pages in the original Spanish. He wrote much of it while dying of liver disease, revising against a clock he knew was running out, and asked that the five parts be published as five separate novels to support his children financially after his death; his estate published them as one book instead.