Holly opens with a scene of peculiar horror. In 2012 Jorge Castro, a creative writing teacher in a university town, is jogging on a misty evening. He sees two colleagues, professors Emily and Rodney Harris, struggling to load Rodney in his wheelchair into their van. “She can’t be much more than seventy. Her husband looks much older.” He offers to help push the chair up the ramp. Too late, he realises their objective. Jorge wakes confined to a cage in their basement. To what end, we do not know, but the specially constructed cage does not bode well, nor do the tools hanging from the wall, or the other facilities provided: “he knows what the Porta-John means: someone intends for him to be here a while”. Emily Harris enters and offers him a raw calf’s liver, “a slab of dark red meat floating in an even darker red liquid”. Eat this or nothing, she tells him.
Eleven years later, Holly Gibney has just finished participating in her mother’s funeral over Zoom when a new client, Penny Dahl, leaves a voice message begging her to investigate her missing daughter Bonnie. Slowly, Holly begins to connect the dots between Bonnie and other disappearances in the neighbourhood over the years.
