Don Joslyn

Venturing into some of the roughest slums of St. Louis, Jesuit priest Rev. Charles Dismas Clark dedicates himself to helping young ex-convicts who are struggling to rejoin a society that fears and rejects them. An especially wrenching case for the Reverend is Billy Lee Jackson, a troubled thief whose personal demons constantly tempt him back to a life of crime — and may ultimately make him pay the highest price for a few desperate decisions.

Clyde King, a toy store employee whose hobbies include making wooden toys and stalking women, is coveted by the female owner of one of the biggest toy companies in the world. She is enchanted by King's hand-carved toys, and she delegates the recruitment of the toy-maker to her second-in-command, Lyle "Skippy" Burns. However, King will not join her company as she reminds him of his mother. She becomes the subject of bizarre fantasies in which "Mother," the toy company owner as imagined by King, brow-beats and humiliates him. Discovering King's predeliction for leaving the toy store to stalk women, Skippy first tries to entice Clyde into signing an employemnt contract by supplying him with women, even going as far to dress himself up in drag as a prostitute. But every time he sets King up with a woman, the encounter ends disastrously, so Skippy finally decides to kill him.

An alcoholic former serviceman goes to work collecting debts for gangsters and committing various other crimes, then has a religious conversion and helps other alcoholics.