Rider Keene is the elder of two brothers in a family of Irish-American jewelers in San Francisco’s Mission district. The wartime black markets promise easy money, and the family drifts almost unintentionally into a life of crime. Eventually tricked into exile by his treacherous younger brother, Rider fashions an unlikely life in the Nevada desert, made of casinos and contract killings, until the day he finally returns to the Mission streets with family on his mind—and in his sights.

Spanning forty years of the last century, spun out in three parallel narrative threads, RIDER KEENE asks troubling questions about loyalty and betrayal, morality and murder, against a backdrop of a country adrift in the turmoil of the mid-twentieth century.