How do three sisters write a single suicide note? This is the riddle the Alter sisters - Lady, Vee and Delph - pose at the outset of this darkly funny novel as they finalize their plans to collectively end their lives on New Year's Eve, 1999. Their reasons are not theirs alone, and they prove that the sins of the father are indeed visited upon the children, even to the third and fourth generations. The Jewish Alter family has been haunted by suicide ever since the sisters' great-grandfather, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Lenz Alter, developed the first poison gas used in warfare and also the lethal agent used in the gas chambers.