In the 1920s, three sheltered sisters from a proper New England family turn rum-runners to provide for their family. Left penniless by their father’s death and a relative’s treachery, they use the family’s pleasure schooner to smuggle whiskey from Canada.
Kate, the bookworm, hatches the plan, sacrificing her last year at Wellesley to make every grueling and dangerous trip. Rosalie risks her engagement to a clergyman to help on the home front – and tends Kate’s gunshot wound from rum-pirates. Aggie, a dazzling flapper hungry for adventure, uses the undertaking to catch the eye of a man she doesn’t realize is a vicious killer.
Kate’s courage in the face of storms, crooks on both sides of the law, and the treacherous tides of the Bay of Fundy changes her view of the world. It also changes the lives of those around her. Joe, the teasing Portuguese-Irish fisherman she hires to captain Pa’s Folly earns money enough to provide previously unimagined help to his poor but close-knit family — but must bear the secret burden of falling in love with Kate. A wealthy old woman dying of loneliness in her cliff-top mansion finds reasons to live. Even Kate’s cousin, shattered in body and spirit by his service in The Great War, is caught in the ripples.
Kate and Aggie’s every success makes their enemies more determined to ruin them. Their gentle cousin becomes an unwitting pawn in a deadly game. The meeting of minds between Kate and Joe, and the mutual attraction they try to deny, forces each to confront the social chasm between them, and the cost of a romance they dare not begin.
THE WHISKEY TIDE is a sweeping historical saga of family ties that bind and chafe and sometimes fray, of adventure and courage, and of new horizons glimpsed in the dark of the moon.
