Title:  The Jazz Cage (novel)

Word count:  80,000

Description:  

It is 1924.  Sixty years after the South’s victory in the Civil War, what was once one nation is now two:  an alcohol-restricting United States and a slavery-permitting Confederacy.  Yankee gangsters team up with Southern liquor giants to satisfy the North’s thirst for bootleg booze.

When a Virginian whiskey tycoon seeks help tracking down two female runaways, his gangland friends send bounty hunter Frank McCluey, quipping “he’s just the man to find two grains of pepper in a jar of salt.”  But the mob made a bad choice.  Frank may be a thug, but he is a thug with a conscience.  Instead of capturing the women, he decides to help them escape to the North, his mission now aided by the headstrong runaway Della and abolitionists from the outlawed Underground Railroad.  Soon Della and Frank become the target of slave catchers, the police, the mob, and most chilling of all, a Confederate agent nicknamed the Basset Hound for his ability to always sniff out and kill his prey.

Read the first 50 pages here.

Status:

Looking for agent.