Two Sides, Three Rivers explores the way that a city shapes the lives of those who live there. Set in and around contemporary Pittsburgh, Dilworth's stories are populated by characters who are attempting to escape their circumstances in a city already constrained by its physical borders and industrial legacy. The power of place helps define them.

Displaced ­Russians use a Gilded Age cemetery in Squirrel Hill as a makeshift stand-in for Moscow. An aspiring private eye discovers that his talents are useless in a town where everyone knows everyone else's business. A young boy tries to reinvent himself only to find that he cannot willfully discard his working-class roots. Robbing the elderly poor, a deceitful musician deprives them of their memories, music, and their worn-out keepsakes.

Again and again, the city exerts its own hypnotic power, and its streets, shops, and neighborhoods help shape motives, actions, and character.