Sweets Maybrey is hard. In the language of the streets, this describes an individual who uses fists first, words second, to solve his problems. Twenty-year-old Sweets has just gotten his life straight after two stints in prison and is graduating high school and has won his first pro fight. He has turned his back on doing bad. But life isn't that simple. The straight and narrow, where his father wants him to be, is sometimes a shifting path, one that's real easy to fall off. Sweets' father disappears into the vicious Philly ghetto called the Bottom, trailed by police who say he killed a man. That same day, the 60 Lot street gang attempts to recruit neighborhood legend Sweets by using his friend Teddie Banks as leverage. They give him three days to make a choice: Join or watch his straight-laced friend die. Sweets melts back into the Bottom, quickly regaining his street-smarts while asserting the violence of his nature. He needs these tools to overcome the cops, street hustlers, and random criminals who inhabit the 'hood. Everything he knows tells him that his father is innocent. As more bodies appear, killed identically and each one known to his father, Sweets begins to wonder. Perhaps the cops are right and his beloved father is a killer. Carefully, clue by clue, Sweets reveals his father, the real man. As he does, he also reveals himself and comes to grips with his own violent nature, long submerged, which he now has to bring to bear to save his father, his friend, and himself.