The darkly comic, Western-inspired story takes place in Oregon and California in 1851. The narrator Eli Sisters and his brother Charlie Sisters are assassins sent to kill Hermann Kermit Warm, an ingenious and likable man, who is accused of stealing from the Sisters' fearsome boss, the Commodore. The series of adventures depicted resemble the narrative form of a picaresque novel, and the chapters are, according to one review, "slightly sketched-in, dangerously close to a film treatment.