En un rancho de California, Robert Osborn sale a buscar a su perro y nunca más regresa. Rastros de sangre y el hallazgo de un arma, hacen que su esposa crea que le han asesinado. Un año después la madre no quiere que el juez dictamine la muerte porque está convencida de que sigue vivo, pero la viuda espera que lo haga para poder seguir con su vida.

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Almost all of the action that happens in Beyond This Point Are Monsters has already occurred when the book begins. Robert Osborne disappeared one year ago; blood was found in the bunkhouse of his ranch; and a knife covered with his blood was recovered. But his body was never found. As the book begins, a hearing is being held to determine if Robert Osborne can be declared legally dead. The focus of the book is not on the trial/hearing or on what really happened to Robert Osborne. The focus is on two women, his wife Devon and his mother, Agnes, and how his disappearance and the hearing affect their lives.

Margaret Millar, the author of Beyond This Point Are Monsters, does have a sociological focus in the story as well as she looks at the plight of migrant workers in Southern California in the late 60’s and she does use the disappearance of Robert Osborne to build suspense as the hearing progresses. Each witness gives another small piece of the story and the reader slowly learns what everyone else in the story already knows about his disappearance. But the focus is on the two women – one which wants to stop being Robert’s wife and be allowed to be his widow and the other who wants there to be some hope left when it is all said and done that her only child may still be alive.

There are no fancy legal maneuvers that solve the case and no sensational, dramatic moments that drive the plot. There is little or no soap opera in the story and little or no sentimentality in the author’s depiction of these women. The story is not big and sensational - the women are not heroines. In fact in most ways they are ordinary. They are like the women the reader knows in the reader’s own life.

The name of the book, Beyond This Point Are Monsters, comes from an old medieval map that the young Robert Osborne had found when he was a child. A European map maker had drawn the map for everything that had been explored up to that point and then at the edge of the map in the unexplored portion of the world the map maker had written “Beyond This Point are Monsters”. As the hearing to determine whether Robert Osborne can be declared legally dead draws to a close, it is clear that that is the same place where both of the women in this story are at – the way their lives were supposed to be is behind them and they are staring into uncharted territory.

Most writers would have chosen to start the story the year before Margaret Millar does – when Robert Osborne went missing. But Margaret Millar wants to look at what has happened to the two women while they have waited for the year between his disappearance and the hearing to determine if he can be declared legally dead. And what she shows the reader is not just the anxieties and frustrations, or even the sorrows that the two women have experienced, Margaret Millar also shows us the monsters that exist for both women, but especially for one of them, beyond this point. ( )