Dorothy meets Casimir at the NoMad Hotel bar and they quickly go up to his room to have sex.

Dorothy stabs Casimir with an ice pick during sex at a stranger's Fire Island house and then burns his body.

Dorothy writes her memoir from inside Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, where she is serving time for murder.

Dorothy accidentally becomes a food critic at the magazine Noir after sitting next to editor Andrew Gotien at a restaurant.

Dorothy and her college roommate Joanne instantly despise each other, causing Joanne to move to another room.

Dorothy's mother dies of stage four lung cancer, and Dorothy uses her sixty-thousand-dollar inheritance to begin a new life in New York.

Dorothy meets the secretive Marco during her college study abroad in Italy, beginning a decades-long obsession.

Dorothy argues with Giovanni during a drive in Italy, kills him with the car, and later cooks and eats his liver.

Dorothy drugs Andrew with Xanax, kills him with carbon monoxide, and slices portions of his body to eat.

Dorothy poisons Gil's meal to trigger a fatal allergic reaction, then throws him overboard after cutting out his tongue.

Dorothy returns to Italy to profile Marco's kosher butchery empire and carefully begins planning his murder.

Dorothy fellates Marco in his slaughterhouse, slits his throat as he climaxes, and performs a ritual butchery on his body.

Detectives Wasserman and MacDonnell visit Dorothy's home and question her about Casimir's disappearance.

Dorothy breaks into Emma's apartment with a cleaver in the middle of the night, finds only a lump of pillows, and is arrested by waiting police.

Dorothy is convicted and sentenced to life plus twenty years; her last free meal is a Long Island roast duck.

Dorothy Daniels is a convicted cannibal and food critic writing her memoir from inside Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, recounting a life shaped by murder and insatiable appetite. The narrative traces her accidental entry into food writing, her college years, and her mother's death before moving into the sequence of four killings she commits over more than a decade. Dorothy kills Giovanni in Italy, Andrew in New York, Gil on his boat, and finally Marco inside his own slaughterhouse, with each murder escalating in planning and ritual. Marco's elaborate kosher butchery represents her self-declared masterpiece, but an impulsive fifth killing of Casimir with an ice pick sets investigators on her trail. Her paranoia drives her to attempt an attack on her only true friend, resulting in her arrest by waiting police. She is convicted and sentenced to life plus twenty years, writing the memoir the reader holds from her prison cell.

The crimes and conviction of Dorothy Daniels.

After killing Casimir, Dorothy burns his body in the stranger's house and then calmly watches television at a friend's nearby home.

Dorothy identifies as a psychopath using DSM-IV criteria and deliberately manipulates the questions of psychology students who interview her in prison.

Dorothy's childhood girlfriends unknowingly model feminine behavior for her, teaching her to mimic their laughter, style, and moods.

Dorothy recognizes her former roommate Joanne driving a bulldozer over vulva-shaped vases at a Boston protest and bails her out of jail.

Dorothy's dying mother tells her she was never her favorite child; Dorothy admits she felt exactly the same about her mother.

A man who has been following Dorothy during her walks in Siena forces his way into her home and rapes her; she describes the experience as fascinating.

Police briefly question Dorothy about Giovanni's death, and she claims she drove away after he threw the car keys at her during their fight.

Dorothy discovers Andrew married her former assistant and had twins, then engineers a seemingly accidental reunion with him a decade later.

Dorothy is fired from her food writing job by editor Chloe James and compulsively bakes banana bread while plotting various forms of revenge.

Emma transforms from jailed activist into a reclusive phone sex operator and controversial artist, earning enough from a gallery show to buy an upscale apartment.

Dorothy throws Gil's EpiPen overboard before serving him the fatal meal, ensuring there is no way to save him from the allergic reaction.

Dorothy researches the intricacies of kosher butchery on library computers to avoid leaving any traceable search history connected to her name.

The night before killing Marco, Dorothy stages an elaborate drunken scene at a hotel, then slips away in disguise through a window.

A receipt from Dorothy's preferred butcher shop, Ottomanelli's, becomes a key piece of physical evidence against her at trial.

Dorothy bumps into a man named Alex as he is buying a hot dog on the street, and he catches her when she stumbles.

This pool covers the texture and context beneath Dorothy's major plot events, from her earliest self-formation through to the mechanics of her downfall. Her childhood girlfriends unwittingly teach her to mimic normalcy, while her dying mother's blunt final honesty and a rape in Italy deepen her emotional detachment from the world. The practical details of her crimes emerge here: the EpiPen thrown overboard before Gil's fatal meal, the staged drunken alibi constructed before Marco's murder, and the routine butcher shop receipt that ultimately seals her conviction. Her professional humiliation at being fired from Eat and Drink fuels a period of obsessive baking and rage, while Emma's parallel transformation from arrested activist to celebrated reclusive artist quietly deepens the bond between them. The pool ends at the moment Dorothy first stumbles into Alex, the one man she will unexpectedly come to love.

The supporting details, backstory, and secondary beats behind Dorothy's crimes.

At age twelve, Dorothy fantasizes about inviting all her future lovers to a table where she can relish the power of their shared desire for her.

Dorothy describes keeping blackmail files on her college sexual partners and learning to pick locks to gather damaging information on men.

Dorothy's mother shows her how to apply makeup, calling it a woman's armor, and instructs her to be excellent at everything she does.

Dorothy searches Marco's room in Siena and finds a hidden passport under a floorboard, revealing his real name and identity as a married Rome butcher.

Dorothy visits Marco in Rome after college graduation and sucks his wedding ring off his finger, then spits it onto his chest.

Dorothy travels to Italy on a truffle-hunting assignment and meets a man named Giovanni on the train, beginning a brief and fatal relationship.

After killing Gil, Dorothy calls the Coast Guard herself to report him missing, worried that his boat's GPS will expose her too soon.

Dorothy decides she will spare Marco's life only if he agrees to have sex with her, binding his fate entirely to his own moral choice.

Marco unexpectedly kisses Dorothy in the slaughterhouse, and she briefly considers whether she could still change her plan and spare his life.

Dorothy grows convinced that Emma conspired with Detective Wasserman, believing Emma is the only person clever enough to have exposed her.

Dorothy admits to herself that Emma is the only person she truly loves and therefore the only person capable of genuinely hurting her.

Dorothy realizes she loves Alex when she buys him an egg coddler while shopping alone, the first time she has ever done something purely to make a man happy.

Alex takes Dorothy to the top of the Empire State Building and proposes marriage; she turns him down to preserve the version of herself she prefers.

In group therapy, Dorothy says she forgives Emma despite being uncertain whether Emma actually betrayed her, baffling the group leader Joyce.

Dorothy opens a letter from Emma that confirms Dorothy confessed everything about her murders but promises she will never tell anyone.

This pool traces the pivotal inner discoveries and quiet revelations that run beneath the surface of Dorothy's story, revealing who she truly is beneath the performance of normalcy. From her childhood understanding of lust as power to uncovering Marco's secret identity buried under a floorboard, Dorothy's life is shaped by the secrets she finds and the impossible conditions she sets for herself. Her self-imposed rule — to spare Marco only if he sleeps with her — exposes how completely she has fused sex, death, and control into a single appetite. The most emotionally charged turning points arrive near the end: her paranoid certainty about Emma's betrayal, her admission that Emma is the only person she has ever loved, and her quiet rejection of Alex's marriage proposal in order to protect the darker self she prefers. The pool closes at the novel's final pages, with Dorothy offering a confused forgiveness in group therapy and at last opening the letter that confirms the strange, enduring bond between the two women.

The hidden discoveries, emotional turning points, and inner revelations that shaped Dorothy.