Charlie's Sportsmen's Club is a long, two-story building on skid-row, housing a long bar, a poker room, a Chinese cafe, and a hotel across the top floor. Business depends on a subculture of alcoholics, gamblers, hustlers, shills, and those in need of a bed. Among them is Alexander Kyness, whose friends call him "Kindness", a man with talent, who has chosen a life of obscurity.
In this odd, little world that ticks along to its own beat of greed, deception, and predation, Kindness's stance of detachment is tested by a number of strange occurrences. More than a few times, unusual events and lingering mysteries ignite his curiosity and beckon him to apply powers of investigation for which he has an apparent gift. Kindness's self-willed anonymity and aversion to personal entanglement may meet their match in Dolly "Little Doll" Grey, the bar manager with formidable wit and will who keeps order over the misfits and malcontents in this place where "something interesting always happens".