Boats Against the Current

January 20, 1937. Luxembourg. Tom dead, the telegraph states bluntly. His long-suffering wife Daisy charged with the murder. And their only daughter Pammy, now a student at the university in Heidelberg, Germany, is telegraphing their old friend Nick Carroway, urging him to come at once.
More curious than compassionate, Nick agrees to leave his widowed mother and the staid law practice he has built in the American Mid-West to come to the aid of the cousin he hasn’t seen since he left New York following Gatsby’s funeral, 15 years ago.
Arriving in Europe weeks later having barely survived the rough Atlantic crossing on the Queen Mary, Nick is appalled to find his confused and crazed cousin sequestered in a mental hospital for the very rich hidden away among the mansions of Luxembourg City. Convinced by the sophisticated daughter he hasn’t seen since she was a child, Nick agrees to help Pammy—or Pam as she insists—exonerate the pitiful Daisy. Together they set out to prove her innocence and find the killer of the man neither of them can even pretend to mourn.
Wild speculations follow one rabbit trail after another, eventually leading the two across the border into a German firestorm that will ultimately engulf the entire world. Encounters with associates only the Buchanan’s well-heeled circle can claim—the Lindberghs, the Duke of Windsor, even Joachim von Ribbentrop—astound Nick as Pam deals with each coolly and familiarly, though none can clear her mother’s name.
But Nick soon realizes Pam’s deeper motive for enticing him to Europe: not to save her mother, but someone more important to her even than Daisy, a brilliant university professor in need of escaping the Nazi dragnet that is strangling the Jewish population.
Finally leaving Daisy in the care of the devoted family lawyer, Nick and Pam turn their full attention to what Nick sees as the higher calling: rescuing the innocent Dr. Rachel Levine with whom he is falling in love. As the desperately valued travel documents become impossible to attain, Pam “borrows” her mother’s American passport and smuggles her now-disguised friend onto the Queen Mary for the journey to New York and freedom.
Nick, unable to face another seasick voyage, gratefully accepts an invitation from his new friend Charles Lindbergh to float home on the well-appointed airship, The Hindenburg.
Boats Against the Current takes on the familiar narrative voice of The Great Gatsby’s Nick Carroway to tell this subsequent story of revenge and rebirth set in the smoldering kindling of 1937 pre-war Luxenbourg. Nick, now a seasoned lawyer and bachelor resettled in the mid-West of his birth, is less the naïve observer of 1925 and more the principled spokesman his milieu has fashioned him to become as he reluctantly answers the desperate call to come to Europe to save what’s left of the Buchannan family. Can he solve the mystery of Tom’s death, exonerate his cousin Daisy, and prove to Pam there is still some shred of decency to be found in a world that appears to have lost its mind on every level? Will he realize before it’s too late that love can be resurrected and reborn from a heart long buried and forgotten? Or will he continue to be as a boat borne ceaselessly back into the past?