Nineteen-year old Jack McGreary is adrift of the faded boomtown of Paradise Flats. Raised by his eccentric and increasingly erratic father, Jack has learned to live by his wits. When a pair of fast-talking swindlers named Virgil and Miss Rose blow through town, Jack falls in with them and together they go on a crime spree across the American Southwest, staging a series of elaborate and hilarious cons and heists. Young Jack is swept along into the world of hot jazz and cold, calculating crimes of the heart as the sexual tension between him and Miss Rose comes to the boil. Someone is being set up. But who is playing who?