Finley, an unnaturally quiet boy who is the only white player on his high school's varsity basketball team, lives in a dismal Pennsylvania town that is ruled by the Irish mob, and when his coach asks him to mentor a troubled African American student who has transferred there from an elite private school in California, he finds that they have a lot in common in spite of their apparent differences.

Orphaned seventeen-year-old Molly Green is eager to start a new life in her aunt's lucrative business selling corpses to medical students, but she quickly becomes entangled in a murderer's plans.

Sixteen-year-old Margaret Rose Nolan, newly arrived from Ireland, finds work at New York City's Triangle Shirtwaist Factory shortly before the 1911 fire in which 146 employees died.

Bullied because of the English father he barely remembers, fourteen-year-old Liam gladly leaves Connemara, Ireland, in 1901 with his uncle and sister, but his problems follow them to Hell's Kitchen in New York City, until he finds a way to leave the past behind.