Twelve-year-old Nunzio's innocence is lost forever when he opens the boot of a wrecked Pontiac Bonneville in his father's junkyard. But who will believe the tale of the horror that he found there when all evidence is lost to the Paradise Salvage crusher?
In a family of Italian-American eccentrics, Danny Boy alone is persuaded by his younger brother's implausible claim. Enlisting the help of their father's renegade cousin, Angelo - a quadriplegic ex-cop with a sinister history of his own - they embark on a bizarre and dangerous trail through the underbelly of small-town America, in a journey that proves to be as much one of personal discovery as an unravelling of the mystery behind the corpse at paradise Salvage.