Runner

In this gripping, emotionally-layered novel set in Prohibition-era Martha’s Vineyard, a young woman from a Black seafaring family plunges into the dangerous world of rum-running to save her home and uncover the truth about her father’s death.

Martha’s Vineyard, 1923. The sea is a gift that keeps on giving to Lena Jameson’s father, Earl, a fisherman turned successful rumrunner who’s built up a small fortune smuggling liquor from offshore ships to thirsty customers back on the island. But when Earl and his entire crew are lost in a mysterious shipwreck that some whisper was no accident, his loved ones are left reeling and penniless—and Lena, who’d been on the cusp of heading off to college in Boston, sees her future slipping away.

Desperate to save her family and her own hopes of escaping their small town, Lena decides to take over Earl’s rum-running business. For a crew, she ropes in Walter, her roguish big brother who leans too hard on the bottle, Sam, her steadfast local boyfriend who wants to keep her tethered to shore, and Dee, a glamorous young woman summering in the Vineyard from Boston, who offers Lena a glimpse of the future she still wants for herself—and who’s keeping an explosive secret.

The foursome takes off on a journey from the quaint, colorful streets of Oak Bluffs through gangland Boston and down to the jazz-filled clubs of Harlem in its early Renaissance, all in search of quick money—and the truth about the shipwreck. But as buried secrets rise to the surface and the temptations of the glittering underworld pull Lena in deeper, soon everything she’s fought to protect hangs in the balance: her heart, her family, and her place in a world quick to condemn women who dare to want more.