Lawrence Wetherhold is miserable and misanthropic: he's a widower, a pompous professor at Carnegie Mellon, an indifferent father to a college student and a high-school senior, and the reluctant brother…

New York, 1957. SPIDER, a 17-year-old gang leader looking to make a rep, gets in way over his head when he blunders into the gambling nest of a notorious gangster….