(Covered the first short story)

The Dew Breaker contains a collection of nine different but interconnected stories. The first entry, the book of the dead, the narrator is a young woman called Ka who is from Haiti but lives in New York. She is forced to travel to Florida with her father on a mission of selling a sculpture to a popular Haitian television personality called Gabrielle Fonteneau. She wakes up and learns that her father is missing together with the sculptor, after she spent the night at a hotel room. She talks to the police who question her. Her father reappears finally as the sun sets in the horizon but he does not have the sculpture.

He instead he transports Ka to a lake where he throws the sculpture into the water, something that annoys her daughter who could not get the reason why he did this. He tells her daughter that he did that because he felt that he was not worth being immortalized as art. He then tells her that the stories she heard about him being imprisoned are all not true but he was in fact employed to torture and kill those who were prisoners, but she asks her to believe that she is regretful of his actions. When they return to the hotel, she calls her mother demanding an explanation of how she was able to live with her father. Her mother responds by saying that he changed upon meeting her, meaning she saved his life. They meet for lunch with Gabrielle the next day and her father lies about his Haitian home so as not to be identified. That experienced seems as one of the hardest emotional turmoil as she tries to understand what she learnt