After a five-year stint in prison for a crime he didn't commit, twenty-six year old Al Segreto is a free man—sort of.
In truth, he's less free now, at the mercies of his meddling family and under the close supervision of his uncle, the eccentric Don of the Segreto Crime Family, than he was in prison, where—if nothing else—he was free to nurse his festering doubts about the family business in the relative quiet of a dimly-lit cell block.
Now that he's back on the mean streets of 1970s Philadelphia, though, Al is forced to take his rightful place as a made man of the Segreto Family, and that means taking control of the family's lucrative vice racket, operating strip clubs, brothels, gay bars, and blackmail schemes across the city: an assignment complicated by Al's burgeoning doubts about his own sexuality, which could prove deadly in the staunchly homophobic culture of the Italian mob.
When a blackmail scheme against a meddlesome politician forces Al to grow closer to flamboyant drag performer Will, a bartender at one of the city's most infamous gay nightclubs, all of his doubts and fears are brought dangerously close to the surface, forcing Al to ask a question that may very well get both of them killed—how, exactly, does a person find their place in the world, and just how far is he willing to go to keep it?
GENRE: historical fiction · crime · romance THEMES: masculinity · violence · generational trauma · the politics of space · homophobia · power · what we owe our families · what we owe ourselves CONTENT WARNINGS: period typical homophobia · sexual assault mention · police brutality · graphic violence · death
