In Chinatown to deliver a baby, Sarah Brandt meets a group of women she might otherwise never have come across: Irish girls who, after alighting on Ellis Island alone, have married Chinese men in the same predicament. But with bigotry in New York from every side, their mixed-race children are often treated badly, by the Irish, the Chinese-even the police.

When the new mother's half-Chinese, half-Irish, 15-year-old niece goes missing, Sarah knows that alerting the constables would prove futile. So she turns to Detective Sergeant Frank Malloy-and together they begin the search themselves. And after they find her, dead in an alley, Sarah and Malloy have ample suspects-from both sides of Canal Street.