Lucas Frost is a former All-American with a Stanford PhD and a sweet gig teaching literature at Westwood University. His younger brother Eddie is a gambler with a dusty old trailer in the middle-of-nowhere Arizona. And while they may seem nothing alike on the surface, and may in fact profess to hate each other, the Frost brothers share a common propensity for making mistakes. On the same day that Lucas gets fired for having an affair with his Dept. Chair's daughter, Eddie gets chased out of Arizona by a crooked vice cop with a grudge. But things are about to get worse for the Frost brothers - because their father has just committed suicide, and he's left them an awkward inheritance. On the one hand, they get their childhood home back in Bakersfield and a not-quite worthless Rare Book Shop. On the other, they also inherit dad's $600,000 debt to the Chinese mob. "Books" follows the Frost brothers as they become small-time bookies in small-town Bakersfield - along the way, playing with the concept of "books" in nearly every way imaginable.