Content Warning: The novel contains references to suicide, child sexual assault, gun violence, and an anti-gay hate crimes. This guide contains analysis of all these elements.

The novel opens from the point of view of a hitman known as Blake. Blake has always been an amoral person, and his lack of empathy for others makes him good at his job. Blake became a hitman when he was 20 years old, after a stranger at a bar drunkenly offered him a lot of money to kill someone. Blake later contacts the stranger, having invented a new identity. He then meticulously plans and carries out the killing of a middle-aged man named Samuel Tadler, making it look like an accident. Since then, he has come up with many more identities and completed many more contract killings.

Before becoming a hitman, Blake attended hospitality school and trained to be chef. He runs a successful, Paris-based vegetarian catering company and lives in Paris under an assumed name, Joe, with his wife, Flora, and two children, Quentin and Mathilde. He keeps his two lives and personae strictly separate (18); he even owns two apartments in Paris under different names.