New Yorkers Eddie Bartlett, George Hally, and slightly younger Lloyd Hart met and became friends, despite they being different personalities, when they fought together in the trenches in France during the Great War. Not knowing what would happen after the war, each believed he would return to the civilian life he left behind, Eddie as a mechanic in hopes of someday owning his own garage, George working in his father's bar again with the hope of someday owning his own, and Lloyd to become a lawyer in he having been a law student. Further, Eddie was hoping to hook up with Jean Sherman, the young woman from Mineola who had been writing to him while he was in France. Things didn't turn out quite the way each had expected, especially for Eddie and George, both in American society not knowing what to do with returning soldiers, and with the onset of Prohibition. And Jean ends up being not quite how she portrayed herself in being much younger than Eddie believed. Eddie is the one who is able to pivot the greatest in he, by chance, falling successfully into the bootlegging business, with the help of people like his pre-war roommate Danny Green, a cabbie, and speakeasy manager Panama Smith, who saw in Eddie a kindred spirit. Despite Eddie not seeing Danny as being fit for a criminal life, Eddie is able to parlay his cabbie job into a taxi business as a front for the bootlegging. He also ends up working with Lloyd, who manages much of Eddie's business and legal dealings, especially with regard to the taxi business, and with George, who he runs into in working the distribution for Eddie's competitor, Nick Brown, and who he convinces to go into business with him instead. The lives of the survivors in this competitive, cutthroat and potentially deadly business is shown over the 1920s, where Eddie, George, and Lloyd may see his own life different than the other two, and as Jean grows into a beautiful young woman, what Eddie had originally seen in the letters and photos she sent to him during the war.