The Bootlegger's Wife

Winner of the Weta Nichols National Fiction Writing Contest for Historical Fiction, 2014.



Life often demands much of love. True love always answers, yes.

It's an age old story. But then again, every love story is brand new. And this my friends is a not a romance, but a love story. With all that that implies. Love's road is full of twists and turns. We know there will be drama, pain, sacrifice and difficult decisions to be made. But it's not the surprises that keep us turning the page, it's the love between two people.

Young Frances Durant was bold, adventuresome and ready for excitement. She, like the rest of the country was ready to throw off the gray days of war and laugh again, now that the 1920s were about to come roaring onto the scene and change everything. What she wasn't ready for was a tall, tanned Marine fresh from the battlefield and ready to take New York City by storm. Frankie Lee was just the sort of guy to sweep a restless young heiress off her feet. The sort of man who could see that her sass was a thin veil covering an emptiness, a longing and a heart waiting to be found.

Their two worlds collide on the dance and set in motion a love story that careens through the twenties, when the world thought the parties would never end, to the crash of 1929 and the devastation that followed. A brush with the dark side of the bootleg world, and a tragedy that reaches out from the cold dark night will test their love over and over.

Life often demands much of love. Sometimes more than a person has left to give.