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House of Sand and Fog is the story of three fragile but determined people whose lives become dangerously entangled when a house is improperly seized and sold at auction. Massoud Amir Behrani is a former member of the Shah of Iran’s elite circle who fled during the country’s revolution and brought his family to the United States. Behrani has kept up a pretence of wealth in order to marry his daughter into a respectable family, despite the fact that he works by day on the California freeways and by night in a convenience store. Willing to risk the remainder of his modest savings to restore his family’s dignity and pay for his son’s college education, he buys a small house at a county auction, planning to resell it again at a high profit. The house belongs to Kathy Lazaro, a recovering alcoholic and cocaine addict, and has been auctioned because of a bureaucratic mistake. Struggling to get her life back on track after a failed marriage, the house is Kathy’s only tie to stability. Desperate to regain her home, Kathy begins to protest the sale and enlists the help of Deputy Sheriff Lester Burdon. Trapped in a marriage without passion and drawn to Kathy by her vulnerability, Lester finds himself falling in love and taking on her cause. In so doing, he decides to take the law into his own hands to recover the house at any cost and becomes the catalyst for the explosive tragedy that ensues.

As the three characters converge in a relentless downward spiral, doomed by their tragic inability to understand one another, this devastating exploration of the American Dream gone awry exposes some very unsettling truths about the world we live in: that sometimes it is our hopes, and not our hatreds, that destroy us.