When a rich Black debutante enlists the help of a low-level speakeasy manager to identify the head of an underground crime syndicate, the two are thrust into the dangerous world of Prohibition-era Chicago.

The year is 1921, and America is burning. A fire of vice and virtue rages on every shore with Chicago at its beating heart.

Twenty-year-old Nelly Sawyer is the daughter of the alleged “wealthiest Negro in America,” a Kentucky horse breeder whose wealth and prestige catapults his family to the heights of the exclusive, elite Black society. After the unexpected death of her brother—the family’s presumed heir—Nelly goes from being virtually unknown to a premier debutante overnight. But Nelly has aspirations beyond society influence and marriage. For the past year, she has worked undercover as an investigative journalist for the Chicago Defender, sharing the achievements and tribulations of everyday Black people living in the shadow of Jim Crow. Now, her latest assignment thrusts her into the den of a dangerous vice, the so-called Mayor of Maxwell Street.

Charming and mysterious, Jay Shorey strives to balance his connection to the Chicago underworld with his desperate yearning for the refinement and protection of high society. Born to a murdered bi-racial couple in rural Alabama, he knows firsthand what it means to be denied a chance at the American dream. When a tragic turn of fate gave Jay a rare path out, he took it without question. He washed up on Chicago’s storied shores and never looked back, until now.

When Nelly’s and Jay’s paths cross, she recruits him to help expose the Mayor and bring about a lasting change in a corrupted city. Trapped between the monolith of Jim Crow, the inflexible world of the Black upper class, and the violence of Prohibition-era Chicago, Jay and Nelly work together and stoke the flames of a love worth fighting for. And yet, as with all things in America, there is a price to be paid. What risk is Nelly willing to take for a young man willing to risk it all?

The Lonely Hearts Hotel is a spellbinding story about two gifted orphans, in love with each other since they can remember, whose childhood talents allow them to rewrite their future. It is a love story with the power of legend, an unparalleled tale of charismatic pianos, invisible dance partners, radicalized chorus girls, drug-addicted musicians, brooding clowns, and an underworld whose economy hinges on the price of a kiss.

Two babies are abandoned in a Montreal orphanage in the winter of 1910. Before long, their talents emerge: Pierrot is a piano prodigy; Rose lights up even the dreariest room with her dancing and comedy. As they travel around the city performing clown routines, the children fall in love with each other and dream up a plan for the most extraordinary and seductive circus show the world has ever seen.

Separated as teenagers, sent off to work as servants during the Great Depression, both descend into the city's underworld, dabbling in sex, drugs, and theft in order to survive. But when Rose and Pierrot finally reunite beneath the snowflakes after years of searching and desperate poverty, the possibilities of their childhood dreams are renewed, and they'll go to extreme lengths to make them come true.

Soon, Rose, Pierrot, and their troupe of clowns and chorus girls have hit New York, commanding the stage as well as the alleys, and neither the theater nor the underworld will ever look the same. With her musical language and extravagantly realized world, Heather O'Neill enchants us with a novel so magical there is no escaping its spell.