The author draws the reader into the secret life of Kathleen Hennessy, a nurse's aide who, as both martyr and avenging angel, is a memorable portrait of one of the 'insulted and injured' of American society. Set in the underside of working-class Detroit of the '60s and '70s, this short, lyric novel sketches Kathleen's violent childhood-shattered by a broken home, child-beating, and murder-and follows her into her early adult years as a hospital health-care worker. Overworked, underpaid, and quietly overzealous, Kathleen falls in love with a young doctor, whose exploitation of her sets the course of the remainder of her life, in which her passivity masks a deep fury and secret resolve to take revenge.