When Mary Connally reexamines her life after her mother's stroke, she doesn't like what she sees-and she realizes she wants more out of life before it's too late. Leaving her husband of twenty years, she moves to Manhattan where she meets Salvatore Paresi (aka Sallie Dome or Sal), an old-school gangster whose lust for life proves irresistible to Mary.

After months of ambivalence, she ignores the niggling voice of better judgment and attempts to bridge the gap created by their difference in age, culture, and principles in the naive hope that they can escape his past. Having worked in a law firm for thirty years, Mary is familiar with the judicial system. She knows that a defense attorney will look for any snag in a case that could possibly help his client. Likewise, the prosecutor will look for and use whatever he can to obtain a conviction.

When Sal is arrested, however, Mary sinks into a legal and emotional quagmire, and she realizes for the first time just how blind justice can be. Never has the line between good and evil, complicity and compliance, and life and death, been drawn so thin.