It’s 1953 and life is good at Shady’s, the Sweetwater brothers’ fish camp, dancehall, and beer joint on Ransom Island. The biggest event in the island’s history is coming up—an integrated dance featuring Duke Ellington. It’s a daring idea for fifties-era Texas, and not everyone is happy about it. But soon interracial dancing becomes the least of the Sweetwaters’ problems. Galveston mobsters track a runaway girl to Shady’s and decide the offbeat island is the perfect place to diversify their illegal rackets . . . And God help anyone who gets in their way. Suddenly, life on sleepy little Ransom Island becomes crowded, complicated—and very, very dangerous.
It’s 1953 and life is good at Shady’s, the Sweetwater brothers’ fish camp, dancehall, and beer joint on Ransom Island. The biggest event in the island’s history is coming up—an integrated dance featuring Duke Ellington. It’s a daring idea for fifties-era Texas, and not everyone is happy about it. But soon interracial dancing becomes the least of the Sweetwaters’ problems. Galveston mobsters track a runaway girl to Shady’s and decide the offbeat island is the perfect place to diversify their illegal rackets . . . And God help anyone who gets in their way. Suddenly, life on sleepy little Ransom Island becomes crowded, complicated—and very, very dangerous.
Drifting silently on the water about forty nautical miles off the Texas coast, Charlie Sweetwater sits aboard his boat, alone with his thoughts, when from the darkness he hears a man swimming toward him. But not just any man. His name is Julien Dufay, the wealthy French scion of a family-owned petrochemical dynasty headquartered in Houston. Charlie plucks the exhausted Frenchman from the Gulf of Mexico and delivers him back to his rarified world. But of course, no good deed ever goes unpunished. As Charlie is drawn deeper into Julien’s erratic orbit, he discovers a man possessed. Dufay is consumed by his vision of discovering the site of Fort Saint Louis: the famed—and doomed—17th century settlement of French explorer, Robert Cavelier de La Salle. Thanks to Julien, and his own restless curiosity, Charlie is pulled into a web of obsession, murder and greed. Julien wants to find La Salle’s long-lost colony (and the treasure of artifacts buried with it) as a legacy for himself, his family and the greater glory of France. But the project’s ambitious sponsor, Jean-Marc Dufay, is hell-bent on getting at the rich natural gas resources hidden beneath the site, even if it means using his own brother as a pawn to feed his ambitions. Standing in the way is the stubborn old man on whose South Texas ranch Julien and Jean-Marc are converging, along with his trio of scurrilous sons, who have their own covert agenda—an agenda that can be lethal to outsiders. Charlie struggles to make sense of it all, with the help of the beautiful marine archeologist who is excavating La Salle’s shipwreck La Belle in nearby Matagorda Bay. But as he digs deeper into Julien Dufay’s danger-fraught quest, he discovers that history has a way of repeating itself, and that some ghosts just won't stay buried.
Charlie Sweetwater returns to his hometown to visit his brother but arrives to find he is a no-show: The Coast Guard has discovered Johnny’s shrimp boat drifting abandoned in the Gulf. Is it “death by misadventure” as the authorities presume, or something more sinister? Meanwhile, Fulton Harbor, where Charlie’s family have docked their shrimp boats for generations, has changed—and not for the better. Hard-working Vietnamese fishermen are under the thumb of Col. Nguyen Ngoc Bao, a ruthless exiled gangster who aims to recreate his criminal enterprise in a New World setting. Confronting Bao and his thugs are Charlie and a mismatched group of good guys (and gals): a fast-and-loose Cajun hustler, a salty cast of “Third Coast” barroom regulars, a handful of courageous Vietnamese émigrés, a menacing ex-convict, and a misplaced Texas Ranger who discovers a slice of the Lone Star State that the cowboy movies of his boyhood never prepared him for. Along the way Charlie finds himself falling for his brother’s girlfriend, whose zealous desire to see justice served tests his own limits for loyalty and commitment. Unlikely heroes arise from improbable circumstances, and the denizens of the small seaside community find their fortunes and fates ebbing and flowing like the tidal flux of the ocean itself.
Drifting silently on the water about forty nautical miles off the Texas coast, Charlie Sweetwater sits aboard his boat, alone with his thoughts, when from the darkness he hears a man swimming toward him. But not just any man. His name is Julien Dufay, the wealthy French scion of a family-owned petrochemical dynasty headquartered in Houston. Charlie plucks the exhausted Frenchman from the Gulf of Mexico and delivers him back to his rarified world. But of course, no good deed ever goes unpunished. As Charlie is drawn deeper into Julien’s erratic orbit, he discovers a man possessed. Dufay is consumed by his vision of discovering the site of Fort Saint Louis: the famed—and doomed—17th century settlement of French explorer, Robert Cavelier de La Salle. Thanks to Julien, and his own restless curiosity, Charlie is pulled into a web of obsession, murder and greed. Julien wants to find La Salle’s long-lost colony (and the treasure of artifacts buried with it) as a legacy for himself, his family and the greater glory of France. But the project’s ambitious sponsor, Jean-Marc Dufay, is hell-bent on getting at the rich natural gas resources hidden beneath the site, even if it means using his own brother as a pawn to feed his ambitions. Standing in the way is the stubborn old man on whose South Texas ranch Julien and Jean-Marc are converging, along with his trio of scurrilous sons, who have their own covert agenda—an agenda that can be lethal to outsiders. Charlie struggles to make sense of it all, with the help of the beautiful marine archeologist who is excavating La Salle’s shipwreck La Belle in nearby Matagorda Bay. But as he digs deeper into Julien Dufay’s danger-fraught quest, he discovers that history has a way of repeating itself, and that some ghosts just won't stay buried.
Charlie Sweetwater returns to his hometown to visit his brother but arrives to find he is a no-show: The Coast Guard has discovered Johnny’s shrimp boat drifting abandoned in the Gulf. Is it “death by misadventure” as the authorities presume, or something more sinister? Meanwhile, Fulton Harbor, where Charlie’s family have docked their shrimp boats for generations, has changed—and not for the better. Hard-working Vietnamese fishermen are under the thumb of Col. Nguyen Ngoc Bao, a ruthless exiled gangster who aims to recreate his criminal enterprise in a New World setting. Confronting Bao and his thugs are Charlie and a mismatched group of good guys (and gals): a fast-and-loose Cajun hustler, a salty cast of “Third Coast” barroom regulars, a handful of courageous Vietnamese émigrés, a menacing ex-convict, and a misplaced Texas Ranger who discovers a slice of the Lone Star State that the cowboy movies of his boyhood never prepared him for. Along the way Charlie finds himself falling for his brother’s girlfriend, whose zealous desire to see justice served tests his own limits for loyalty and commitment. Unlikely heroes arise from improbable circumstances, and the denizens of the small seaside community find their fortunes and fates ebbing and flowing like the tidal flux of the ocean itself.
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