Snyder takes a trip to a town outside of Billings, Montana to see Paul Monson, an electrical design technician in his early sixties. In 2001, Monson’s son-in-law Rocky bought a gun from a local newspaper advertisement and returned home to shoot Monson’s daughter, Michelle, aged 23, and his two grandchildren, ages 6 and 7, before killing himself.

Snyder backtracks to a pivotal moment in her own life, when she was recently returned from Cambodia and met Suzanne Dubus. Snyder had chronicled harrowing tales of survival in Cambodia, and in America she felt insulated and unfulfilled. Dubus told Snyder that she was working on a program to predict domestic violence homicides, launching Snyder’s 10-year investigation into the issue. 

Domestic violence is so prevalent that Snyder characterizes it as being “as common as rain […] 137 women each and every day are killed by intimate partner or familial violence across the globe. This does not include men. Or children” (5). Talking to Dubus, Snyder realized that the violence she witnessed all over the world happens every day in the United States, and that her assumptions about domestic violence—about legal solutions like restraining orders and the agency of victims—were all wrong. She also vastly underestimated the problem: “Between 2000 and 2006, 3,200 American soldiers were killed; during that same period, domestic homicide in the United States claimed 10,600 lives […] Twenty people in the United States are assaulted every minute by their partners” (6).