Whiskey Wars | Sherilyn Decter

The stakes just keep climbing in this satisfying prohibition-era mystery series.

- Joelene Pynnonen, Independent Book Review

Pony Gulch, Montana. 1927. Everything Delores Bailey built is gone.

She came back from Virginia City to find her moonshine still burned to the ground — the rough wooden shed she built with her own hands, the equipment she knew piece by piece like old friends, the clearing in the trees that was the closest thing she’d ever had to a place that was truly hers. All of it ash and charred timber.

Delores has spent her whole life learning not to need things. She learned that lesson early, in a Philadelphia hotel room with her brothers’ boots on her chest and Mickey Duffy’s crew playing cards in the next room. She learned it again every time she had to pack her bag and move on. The still was supposed to be the end of all that moving. A life she’d built on her own terms, in a place she’d chosen.

Now someone has taken it from her — and she has enemies enough that the list of suspects is long.

With a temperance-minded mayor running for re-election, a brewing magnate moving in on her territory, and her moonshine competition sharpening their knives, Delores needs allies. Mickey Duffy is an old connection, and a dangerous one. Her friends in Pony Gulch — Lucie, Sam, and the silver wolf Lash, back from wherever wolves go between appearances — are closer and less complicated, if not less risky. What she has to decide is how much of her past she’s willing to drag into the present, and how much of the woman she’s becoming she’s willing to sacrifice to survive.

Whiskey Wars is the fourth and most personal book in the Moonshiner Mysteries — a novel about what it costs to build a life, what it means to lose it, and what kind of woman you have to become to get it back.

For readers of Rhys Bowen, Anna Lee Huber, and Victoria Thompson.

Amazon Lady of the Lake, Brandon, Canada

If You Love This Book

Rhys Bowen — readers drawn to the Molly Murphy series for its combination of gritty period atmosphere and a protagonist who has survived things that should have broken her — and hasn’t quite finished processing them — will recognize something of themselves in Delores Bailey in Whiskey Wars.

Anna Lee Huber — if you love historical mysteries where the investigation is inseparable from the protagonist’s internal reckoning — where what happened in the past keeps reaching into the present — the emotional architecture of the Lady Darby series and Whiskey Wars work in very similar ways.

Victoria Thompson — for readers who love Prohibition-era fiction that takes the politics of the period seriously — temperance movements, corrupt local government, the collision between old money and new crime — Thompson’s Gaslight series shares Whiskey Wars‘s interest in the machinery of power and the women who find ways to work around it.

The History Behind the Story

The forests of Montana The moonshine still at the heart of Whiskey Wars sits on federal forest land, and the plot turns on questions of who controls that land and who enforces those controls. Sherilyn Decter worked with Heritage Resources staff at the U.S. Forest Service to trace old maps of Montana’s federal forests from the turn of the century through the 1940s — research that shaped both the geography of Delores’s world and the legal pressures closing in on it.

The Butte Mining Disaster Sheriff Sam Brown’s backstory runs through one of the worst industrial disasters in American history. On June 8, 1917, a fire in the Granite Mountain shaft of Butte, Montana killed 163 miners — the deadliest hard-rock mining disaster in U.S. history. Butte at that moment was already a powder keg: antiwar protest, labor unrest, ethnic tension, corporate exploitation. The disaster ignited all of it. Sam Brown is a man forged in that crucible, and Whiskey Wars is the book where that history comes most directly to bear on who he is.

Charlie Chaplin Charlie has been Delores’s imaginary companion since Big Sky Murder — a coping mechanism rooted in the childhood trauma explored across the Bootleggers’ and Moonshiner series. In Whiskey Wars, as Delores grows more self-aware and builds real relationships, Charlie’s role shifts. Sherilyn Decter has followed both the man and his films throughout the writing of this series, threading period-appropriate details from his life and movies into each book. He appears when Delores needs him — whether she knows she needs him or not.

SERIES NAVIGATION NOTE

Whiskey Wars is the fourth book in the Moonshiner Mysteries. Start with Big Sky Murder or explore the full series.

Delores Bailey’s origin story — her years in Philadelphia before Montana — runs through Books Two and Three of the Bootleggers’ Chronicles. If Whiskey Wars made you curious about Mickey Duffy and where Delores came from, that’s where to find it.

Curious about Lash — the silver wolf who rides in Delores’s truck bed and keeps her honest? His full story is told in Lash, a free novella for newsletter subscribers.