Accompanied by her daemon (her spirit-familiar), Lyra Belacqua sets out to prevent her best friend and other kidnapped children from becoming the subject of gruesome experiments in the Far North.

Husband and father Monte Becket, unable to repeat the success of his first novel despite years of attempts, leaves his family behind in Minnesota in 1915 to join self-confessed rascal Glendon Hale, an aging train robber, on a journey in search of the wife he abandoned nearly two decades earlier--pursued by ex-Pinkerton detective Charles Siringo every step of the way.