Gathering Storm

She buried the King of the Bootleggers. Now she's going to build a kingdom of her own.

Coconut Grove, Florida. 1932.

Edith Duffy steps off the Orange Blossom Special with a mountain of luggage, a dead husband's money, and absolutely no intention of grieving quietly.

Mickey Duffy ran the biggest bootlegging operation in Philadelphia. Everyone assumed Edith was simply the woman on his arm — beautiful, sharp-tongued, decorative. They were wrong, and she has come to Florida to prove it.

On a stretch of mangrove coast where the rum boats slip in from Bimini after dark, Edith buys a derelict waterfront saloon and starts building the one thing she has never had: something that belongs to her alone. Gator Joe's. A dock, a bar, and a smuggling route the Coast Guard hasn't found yet.

What she doesn't plan on is the crew that assembles around her. A boatman who refuses to be bossed. A cook who feeds everyone whether they asked or not. A Miccosukee boy with far more nerve than sense — and the aunt who reads his future in a deck of tarot cards and doesn't like what she sees. And Cleo Lythgoe, the Queen of the Bahamas, who runs Scotch out of Nassau and may be the only woman alive who understands exactly what Edith is trying to do.

But there's a preacher in town who has decided Edith Duffy is the devil's own work. He has a gang of waterfront thugs eager to prove it, and a long, patient talent for hurting people where it lands hardest.

When they finally come for her, they won't come for the money.

They'll come for the people she has let get close.

Edith Duffy has spent her whole life believing that needing someone hands them a weapon. She is about to learn what it costs to find out she was right — and what it's worth anyway.

Gathering Storm is the first book in the Rum Runners' Chronicles, a gripping historical women's fiction trilogy set in the last dangerous years of Prohibition. If you were hooked by Boardwalk Empire and Peaky Blinders, or you love the fierce, unconventional heroines of Beatriz Williams and Kate Quinn, you'll be swept away by Edith Duffy and the family she never meant to build.

Scroll up and grab your copy of Gathering Storm today — and find out what happens when a gangster's widow stops asking permission.