Calhoun McBride and Clement Cartwright are men from different worlds. Young Calhoun works backbreaking, midnight shifts at the Snopes Brewery...and earns a little extra selling his body to eager men. Clement left St. Louis to pursue his architectural ambitions and returns to great fanfare as the man planning the city's first skyscraper. But one steamy night, by the Mississippi River, both men find themselves drawn to one another. But what chance has brought together, the machinations of a bitter and cruel man, Belasco Snopes, who thinks St. Louis belongs to him...down to its people, victims for all his appetites. Lambda Literary Award finalist Scott Alexander Hess's new historical novel offers readers a sultry story with menace.