Harry Nieman is going nowhere fast. He's a retired NYPD cop living and working in Albany and Schenectady, two of the dying cities of the Capitol Region of upstate New York. He collects modest pensions from his years as a cop and several years as a State criminal justice executive. He makes a modest living as a lawyer doing mortgage closings, defending DWI summons in town courts, and other small civil and criminal matters. He works sometimes as a private investigator. He's drifting and knows it. He knows these communities well until one day he finds he does not. Nor does he know himself as well as he'd thought.

A friend and client invites him to a bachelor party in a run-down club in an old neighborhood in Schenectady. In only a few hours, Harry is ambushed by three singular events that change his life. Who lined these planets up on my behalf, he wonders, and why me? He quickly discovers. He finds his middle-aged self enthralled in a sexual and romantic relationship he is unable to resist and powerless to end. And enmeshed in a crime that starts as a thoughtless adventure with his new friend, a woman much younger than himself, that becomes a matter of life and death for both. Like so many public figures we've seen, Harry is a man experiencing and acting out a mid-life sexual crisis that affects nearly every aspect of his daily life. One summer night, Harry says to himself, I am in my heart a witness and a pilgrim, no more, no less. He finds this comforting.

But, like a lot of people, Harry is forced to recognize he often lies not only to others but to himself. A shrink once told him he's so good at lying he doesn't know when he's doing it. We have met Harry Nieman before, in ROOFTOPS and THE SCRIPT DOCTOR and MORPHED. HOT BOX jigsaws into a period of time before MORPHED. It's a take on the old stories about a May-November relationship and a whore with a heart of gold.