Anxious to see his brother after sailing off-shore for weeks, Jake Parson sails into Beaufort, North Carolina, in the Spring of 1923. After he docks in the harbor, he learns his brother is missing at sea. Set against Prohibition’s backdrop of boats and booze and rag and jazz, Jake senses foul play and believes the answers to his brother’s disappearance lay in the port town. His search leads him into the rum-running operations of Beaufort’s watermen.
While privately struggling with bouts of shell shock from his service in The Great War, Jake enters the town and is soon smitten with the jazz musician Nell Guthrie, engaged to marry into a powerful family. He learns local rum runners are piloting small boats in the open ocean to collect illegal booze from ships traveling the “Whiskey Road,” that stretches from Nassau to New York City’s Rum Row. Jake soon scratches the thin veneer of civility in this seemingly safe port, and manages to challenge the separate and unequal Jim Crow customs, small-town provincialism, and Nell’s formidable fiancé. As the search for his brother intensifies, Jake has to work fast to outmaneuver his enemies.
While privately struggling with bouts of shell shock from his service in The Great War, Jake enters the town and is soon smitten with the jazz musician Nell Guthrie, engaged to marry into a powerful family. He learns local rum runners are piloting small boats in the open ocean to collect illegal booze from ships traveling the “Whiskey Road,” that stretches from Nassau to New York City’s Rum Row. Jake soon scratches the thin veneer of civility in this seemingly safe port, and manages to challenge the separate and unequal Jim Crow customs, small-town provincialism, and Nell’s formidable fiancé. As the search for his brother intensifies, Jake has to work fast to outmaneuver his enemies.
