Rhys Bowen — readers of the Molly Murphy series know the particular pleasure of a heroine who is sharp, stubborn, and perpetually underestimated by the men around her. Edith Duffy operates at a different end of the era — older, harder, with more scar tissue — but the same refusal to be manageable. If Molly is the woman still becoming herself, Edith is the woman who knows exactly who she is and intends to prove it.
Adriana Trigiani — if you come to historical women’s fiction for warmth as much as plot — for the texture of community, the friction and loyalty of female friendships, the comedy and grief woven into ordinary days — Trigiani’s big-hearted novels and the Rum Runners’ Chronicles are working the same emotional register. Edith’s crew at Gator Joe’s is not a found family by design. It becomes one anyway.
Lisa Wingate — for readers drawn to women’s fiction about resilience under pressure — where the real story is less about the external danger than about what a woman discovers she’s capable of when her back is against the wall — Wingate’s emotionally grounded storytelling and Gathering Storm share a belief that strength isn’t something you have. It’s something you find out you had all along.
Gathering Storm is Book One of a complete trilogy. Edith’s story continues in Storm Surge and concludes in Eye of the Storm.
Edith Duffy first appears in the Bootleggers’ Chronicles — five novels set in Philadelphia, 1924–1931, where she plays a pivotal supporting role as Mickey Duffy’s wife. You don’t need to have read that series to follow hers, but if you find yourself wanting the full picture of who she was before Florida, that’s where to look. Start with Innocence Lost.
Curious about the rum runner who shows up on Edith’s doorstep — and where she came from?
Red Sky at Night goes aboard a rum-running ship off the Florida coast in 1932, where Cleo Lythgoe discovers that someone has been watering down Meyer Lansky’s shipment before delivery. With Lansky’s boats due in two days and a sabotaging colleague who’d rather see her fail, Cleo has forty-eight hours to fix someone else’s mess — or pay for it with her life.
A companion novella to the Rum Runners’ Chronicles. Free for readers.
become a newsletter subscriber and get your free copy of Red Sky at Night
The Rum Runners’ Chronicles is set in Coconut Grove, Florida in 1932 — Prohibition’s final years, when enforcement had become a national joke and the rum-running trade off the Florida coast was as well-organized as any legitimate business.
Several characters in the novel were real people. Gertrude “Cleo” Lythgoe, known as the Queen of the Bahamas, was a central figure in the Prohibition rum-running world — a British woman who ran one of the most successful liquor wholesaling operations in the Caribbean while men with far less competence tried to tell her she didn’t belong. Her real history is remarkable enough to have earned its own novella.
Mae Capone — Al Capone’s wife — also appears in the Chronicles. Her characterization draws in part from Al Capone: Stories My Grandmother Told Me, a biography written by her granddaughter Diane Patricia Capone. A complex and often-overlooked figure in the Capone story, Mae was far more than a footnote.
The rum-running infrastructure depicted in the novel is grounded in research into the actual routes, methods, and community culture of the Florida bootlegging trade — including the storied rest stop described in the author’s note, a cluster of wooden shacks near the Hillsboro lighthouse north of Fort Lauderdale that served the trade throughout the Prohibition years.
The tarot card readings woven through Cassie’s storyline are based on the Rider Waite deck, published in 1910 and still one of the most widely used decks in the world.
