A naive young man assumes a dead man's identity and finds himself embroiled in an underground world of power, violence, and chance where men gamble behind closed doors on the lives of other men.
Dumped on her grandparents for the summer by her indifferent mother, acerbic and self-destructive teenager Greta disrupts the elderly couple's staid life on the Jersey Shore. Eventually, a romance helps Greta face down her demons.
In what would cause a fantastic media frenzy, Clifford Irving sells his bogus biography of Howard Hughes to a premiere publishing house in the early 1970s.