Following her 2024 debut, ALL WE WERE PROMISED, Ashton Lattimore introduces Lena Jameson. Youthful Lena had earned her sea legs when her dad, Earl, let her steer the Honeysuckle on fishing trips. At age 23, Lena takes on the responsibilities of managing a household and the family-owned Clam Shack in the gender and race inequity of segregated Martha’s Vineyard during 1923’s Prohibition era.

"An unapologetic feminist current courses through RUNNER like the Gulf Stream. Thriller, suspense and surprise mystery aspects are embedded in this laudable work of historical fiction."

Lena poignantly realizes that her rum-running father was more sinner than saint after he and his crew die in a suspicious shipwreck. Her brother, Walter, is a gadabout who sails his ship in a contraband bottle of bootlegged booze. As for her mom, “Sarah was all strength and focus, right up to the moment she wasn’t.” Delinquent mortgage payments and property taxes force chameleon Lena to become a rumrunner. “Ain’t no shame in trying to take care of family.”

Due to the sea claiming Earl, there’s only a memorial service, after which Dee Brooks from Boston snags a printed eulogy and obit that omits key factors of his life. Dee is challenged by locating accommodations since “rooming houses that took in colored guests in Oak Bluffs could be counted on one hand with fingers to spare.”

Lena assembles a motley crew consisting of Walt, sometimes-boyfriend Sam, and Dee. After a near-profitless haul of hooch for local guesthouses, Lena and crew branch out to gangland Boston and the Jazz Age of Harlem. They encounter trouble at each turn: gangster ambushes, a competitor rumrunner ramming their vessel, and authorities invoking the 1919 Volstead Act to ransack the Clam Shack.

When Lena and Dee are about to accept defeat, powerful women guide them to success. “But as ever, a woman had stepped into the gap where a man had failed.”

An unapologetic feminist current courses through RUNNER like the Gulf Stream. Thriller, suspense and surprise mystery aspects are embedded in this laudable work of historical fiction.