In 1942 the Nazis systematically exterminated the majority of Serbia's Jews using carbon monoxide and specially designed trucks. The only information the narrator of this bleakly comic novel can find about the summer when his relatives disappeared is the names of the truck drivers, Götz and Meyer. During his research he becomes fascinated by the unknowable characters and daily lives of these men. But his imagination proves a dangerous force and his obsession with the past threatens to overwhelm him.