55 pages • 1-hour read
There Are No Saints
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Chapters 17-24Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, sexual violence and harassment, graphic violence, child abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, and sexual content.
Chapter 17 Summary: “Cole”
Cole arrives at Mara’s house for her gallery show, annoyed to discover that she has already left independently. He worries that Shaw might discover both Mara’s survival and Cole’s professional relationship with her. Cole’s driver takes him to the gallery, where he rudely demands Mara’s location from Sonia. Cole pushes through the crowd until he finds Mara, grabbing her arm and scolding her for not waiting for him. Mara responds by “boldly” kissing Cole, and he realizes that this is how she expected the evening to unfold.
Chapter 18 Summary: “Mara”
After a passionate kiss that leaves Mara with a bloody lip, Cole introduces her to influential gallery guests as his protégé, publicly claiming partial credit for her work and talent. He rebuffs Jack Brisk, who again attempts to purchase Cole’s Olgiati. Mara’s roommates Frank, Erin, and Joanna arrive with Joanna’s boyfriend, Paul, but Cole remains standoffish during their brief interaction. Mara notices Cole anxiously scanning the crowd for someone who never appears and visibly relaxing once he concludes that this person isn’t coming.
Feeling triumphant from her artistic success but also drawn to Cole’s dark intensity, Mara pulls him into an empty office for a sexual encounter. However, the moment ends when art dealer Simon Grundy appears. Cole cruelly suggests that Mara include Simon in her “gratitude,” humiliating her. Refusing this suggestion, Mara asserts her independence by storming out of the gallery and inviting Logan, her tattoo artist, to leave with her instead.
Chapter 19 Summary: “Cole”
Cole watches Mara and Logan depart in a taxi and then encounters city planner Marcus York, who pitches a public sculpture commission while Cole frets about Shaw’s absence that night. During the conversation, Cole receives a motion alert from a hidden camera installed in Mara’s studio and excuses himself. He finds a private location and then remotely watches Mara and Logan drinking, talking, and having sex on a canvas, incorporating paint into their intimate act. When Mara stares directly at the camera during her climax, Cole realizes that she knows about his surveillance and staged the encounter as revenge. Despite this knowledge, he masturbates while watching.
The next morning, Cole discovers the paint-smeared canvas hanging in his office with the title The Best Night of My Life. Overcome with unprecedented rage and regret, he destroys his prized solar-system glass sculpture.
Chapter 20 Summary: “Mara”
After dismissing Logan, Mara hangs her provocative painting in Cole’s office as retaliation. During her Uber ride home, she contemplates her actions and fears Cole’s potential revenge. The following morning, she finds Erin, Frank, Joanna, and another roommate, Heinrich, disturbed by news of a gruesome murder.
When they show Mara graphic crime-scene photos, she realizes that the victim’s build and tattoo placement resemble her own. Learning that the body was found near Cole’s neighborhood and recalling his fury from the previous night, Mara wonders if he murdered the woman. This thought causes her to vomit from suspicion and fear.
Chapter 21 Summary: “Cole”
Sonia discovers Cole’s office wrecked and his solar model destroyed. As Cole storms off, he observes the building’s receptionist, Janice, and several artists viewing the murder photos online; Cole immediately recognizes the killing as Shaw’s work. He notes a new level of rage in the murder method and realizes that this is why Shaw missed the gallery show. Obsessed with finding Mara, Cole goes to her house, but Frank informs him that she isn’t there.
Cole uses Mara’s social-media accounts to identify Logan and his workplace, the Paint It Black tattoo parlor. He ambushes Logan in the alley behind the shop, threatening him and demanding information about his relationship with Mara. When Logan explains that they’re simply acquaintances and that he tattooed her once, Cole demands to use Logan’s tattoo gun.
Chapter 22 Summary: “Mara”
Mara returns to her studio late at night, hoping to avoid Cole, and begins working on a new painting of a devil figure. Cole appears unexpectedly, confronts her about the “gift” she left in his office, and handcuffs her to a pipe. He rips open her top and reveals a tattoo gun, declaring that he cannot tolerate “another man’s mark” on her body (160). Cole forcibly tattoos over her old snake tattoo while simultaneously caressing her, creating a confused mixture of pain and pleasure that causes Mara to climax despite herself.
After Cole completes the tattoo and uncuffs her, Mara sees in the mirror that Cole has created a beautiful wild garden design over her old tattoo. Cole then hands her the gun and asks her to tattoo him in return. She agrees, creating a design of two entwined snakes across his back.
Chapter 23 Summary: “Cole”
Cole and Mara walk through San Francisco at sunrise, their new tattoos creating a painful bond between them. Cole admits that he pushed her away because he lacked control over his intense desire for her. He also says that if he fully revealed himself to Mara, she might not like him; Mara responds by taking his hand and saying that she “shouldn’t like [him] now” but does (170).
When they pass a mother singing to her baby, Mara becomes visibly upset and reveals traumatic childhood memories about her mother and stepfather’s neglect and abuse. For the first time, Cole experiences empathy for another person and apologizes for Mara’s past suffering. This unexpected sincerity from Cole moves Mara, prompting her to kiss him softly.
Chapter 24 Summary: “Mara”
Cole examines Mara’s new devil painting in her studio, leading to a conversation about art, love, and their parents. When Mara prepares for her bartending shift at the Zam Zam bar, Cole insists on accompanying her. He watches her work until a group of men begin harassing her, with one slapping her backside. Cole erupts in violence, smashing a bottle over one man’s head and slashing another with the broken glass.
After Mara pulls him outside, Cole declares that she is his acquisition and that he protects what belongs to him. He then surprises her by revealing that her painting, sold by Betsy Voss, fetched $22,000. Cole invites Mara to attend the Artists Guild Halloween party with him, and she agrees, deciding that she will dress as Medusa for the occasion.
Chapters 17-24 Analysis
The motif of surveillance gains new dimensions when Mara stages her sexual encounter with Logan specifically for Cole’s viewing, subverting observation’s traditional power dynamics. By performing for the camera, she simultaneously satisfies and mocks Cole’s compulsion to watch, demonstrating her understanding of his psychology. This reversal illustrates how Mara refuses to remain a passive subject of observation, instead claiming agency within the system designed to strip her of power. The camera becomes a conduit for communication between them, a technological medium through which they engage in psychological warfare while paradoxically deepening their intimate connection: Cole’s systematic study of Mara’s preferences through repeated viewing of her intimate video transforms surveillance from passive observation into active preparation for both the manipulation and the pleasure that characterize the mutual tattooing scene.
The tattoos themselves emerge as the central symbol for the fusion of artistic creation and possessive claiming that characterizes Cole and Mara’s bond and develops the theme of Art as Creation and Destruction. Cole’s forcible tattooing of Mara is an act of violent appropriation; he literally inscribes his artistic vision onto her body while marking his territory. The wild garden design that replaces her simple snake tattoo demonstrates Cole’s superior technical skill while subsuming Logan’s previous mark, effectively rewriting Mara’s bodily narrative according to his aesthetic vision. However, when Mara reciprocates by tattooing intertwined snakes on Cole’s back, the exchange transforms from unilateral domination into mutual binding. The snakes—one white, one black—symbolize their complementary yet oppositional natures. The positioning of Mara’s snake in a garden evokes the biblical story of humanity’s expulsion from Eden and thus suggests loss of innocence, yet it is significant that she chose the snake for herself before ever meeting Cole. In the context of the broader motif of predators, it hints at Mara’s own capacity for violence, which she enacts by permanently marking Cole’s previously unmarked flesh and establishing their relationship as one of reciprocal possession.
Indeed, as both characters channel their psychological turmoil into creative work that mirrors their internal states, the relationship between artistic expression and violence becomes increasingly complex. As much as it is an act of agency, Mara’s sexual performance for Cole’s camera is also an instance of Calculated Self-Destruction as a Strategy for Survival, her deliberate provocation showing her willingness to embrace danger. The art that emerges from this episode is correspondingly complex—created by sex (an act associated with creation) but also aggressive in intent. Likewise, Mara’s devil painting serves as a direct artistic response to her relationship with Cole, transforming him into a mythological figure that embodies both temptation and damnation and thus indicating her awareness of the threat he poses. Her conversation with Cole about its inspirations suggests parallels between the dangers of love and the violence of artistic creation. Mara comments that in Caravaggio’s David With the Head of Goliath, Caravaggio “used his own face as the model for Goliath’s severed head” (173), to which Cole responds that Caravaggio modeled David on his lover and likely “knew that love is inherently dangerous” (173).
This idea is central to the novel’s exploration of The Desire for Control Versus the Demands of Love: Cole resists love because it involves vulnerability. Nevertheless, Cole’s characterization undergoes a fundamental shift as he experiences regret and empathy for the first time, emotions that threaten his carefully constructed identity. His destruction of the cherished solar-system sculpture represents more than mere rage; it constitutes an act of self-punishment for his cruelty toward Mara and a violent rejection of the vulnerability she has awakened in him. The sculpture’s destruction parallels his internal fragmentation as emotions that he has never encountered begin to crack his psychological facade. Cole’s unprecedented apology to Mara during their sunrise walk marks a pivotal moment in his emotional evolution, as he acknowledges her pain with genuine sympathy rather than calculating manipulation. Even his deployment of violence shifts: Cole’s violent attack on the men harassing Mara demonstrates how his protective instincts manifest through brutality rather than conventional heroism, but it is also a notable departure from his previous pattern of calculated killing for his own satisfaction or self-interest. In the context of the dark-romance genre, which typically does not fully “redeem” its male protagonists, this constitutes significant character development.
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