Rhys Bowen — the Molly Murphy series ends each book with its heroine changed by what she’s survived, but still fundamentally herself — harder in the right places, softer in others, more certain of what she won’t accept. That’s the emotional register Eye of the Storm is working in. Edith doesn’t emerge unscathed. She emerges knowing exactly what she was fighting for.
Adriana Trigiani — Trigiani’s best novels understand that the real victory isn’t the external plot resolution; it’s the moment when a woman looks around at the life she has assembled — imperfect, surprising, fiercely hers — and chooses it deliberately. The final scene of Eye of the Storm is exactly that moment for Edith.
Lisa Wingate — for readers drawn to women’s fiction where survival means more than staying alive — where what you’re really fighting for is the right to define your own family, on your own terms — Wingate’s deeply felt storytelling and the Rum Runners’ Chronicles are asking the same questions. Eye of the Storm is where the answer finally arrives.
Eye of the Storm is the conclusion to a complete trilogy. Edith’s story begins in Gathering Storm and deepens in Storm Surge.
New to the series? Start with Gathering Storm
Edith Duffy’s full history — who she was before Florida, the decade she spent as the wife of Philadelphia’s King of the Bootleggers — is told in the Bootleggers’ Chronicles, five novels set in Philadelphia, 1924–1931. The back matter of Eye of the Storm sends you there directly, and for good reason: once you’ve finished Edith’s story, Mickey’s world is where the questions you’re left with get answered. Start with Innocence Lost
You’ve spent three books alongside Cleo Lythgoe. Before she arrived in Coconut Grove, she was aboard a rum-running ship in the Bahamas — with a waterlogged shipment, a sabotaging colleague, and Meyer Lansky’s boats due in forty-eight hours.
Red Sky at Night is where Cleo’s story starts. Free for readers.
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Want to go back further? Edith and Mickey’s story begins in Philadelphia in 1922. Again, exclusive for newsletter subscribers. Download Destinations free
Several of the most compelling women in Eye of the Storm were real people.
Cleo Lythgoe — the Queen of the Bahamas — ran one of the most successful rum-running wholesaling operations in the Caribbean, doing it as a British woman in a trade dominated by men who found her presence alternately useful and intolerable. Mae Capone, shaped in part by her granddaughter Diane Patricia Capone’s biography Al Capone: Stories My Grandmother Told Me, was far more than Al Capone’s wife — a complex woman who navigated an impossible position with considerable intelligence. And Marie Waite — Spanish Marie, as she was known on the Florida coast — was one of the most formidable figures in the actual rum-running trade. All three women were legends in their time. Blog posts on sherilyndecter.com go deeper into their stories.
The hurricane at the heart of Eye of the Storm is based on real weather history: 1931 was one of the most tempestuous years on record in Florida, producing thirteen tropical storms and three hurricanes. For the purposes of the story, the storm was moved from October to January 1932 — late enough in the season that even Meyer Lansky, who appears briefly, notes it’s unusual.
The Spanish Lady, the sea shanty that provides comfort to those sheltering through the storm at Goodtimes, is a real ballad — registered with the Stationers’ Company in England in December 1624, still being sung three hundred years later by people who needed something to hold onto in the dark.
Cassie’s name carries its own research layer. Cassandra comes from Greek mythology — the woman cursed to speak true prophecies that no one believed. It was the right name from the beginning.
