The story of a man with a vision of happiness marred by a shadow of a soul on fire and his torturous-sometimes pleasurable-- journey to self-acceptance and ultimate absolution.
After a uniquely eventful childhood, Jerome Wolf spent summers of his youth at the beaches of the mostly Jewish Edgemere Section of Long Island's Rockaways. When he falls for an Irish girl, Dolores Higgins, the caretaker's daughter, his life's path is forever changed. The consequences of their adolescent romance unfold several years later when they meet again. Jerome, finding himself entangled in an unseemly development in Dolores' life, tries to extricate himself from the involvement by a nefarious plot involving a psychopathic assassin.
Riddled with guilt and remorse after the plot fails, Jerome reinvents himself as Gerry O'Brian, marries Dolores and struggles between hedonistic adventure and a stable family life. As Jerome, and later as Gerry, he encounters an array of savory and unsavory characters including a sexually curious baby sitter, a bar-hopping Runyonesque priest, an order of enigmatic nuns, a brutal unprincipled gangster, a psychopathic assassin and a skillful but morally flawed lawyer-- to name a few. As he struggles to reconcile conflicting emotions and goals, his relationship with the Caretaker's Daughter deteriorates and divorce looms ominously. A surprising revelation from his past further complicates matters.
Will he find a path toward his vision of fulfilled desire or become just the shadow of a lost soul cast into the fires of a living hell?