"Blue Hotel" is a historical crime novel which takes place in the postwar Midwest of the 1940s. The winter of 1948. The young driver for a Chicago gangster flees his boss's retribution carrying a valise full of mob money and encounters a traumatized war veteran and a corrupt sheriff in a dying Nebraska railroad town. This novel is imagined as a sequel to Stephen Crane's 1899 short story, "The Blue Hotel."