The Rum Runner: The Legend of Captain John Stewart (2 of 3)
By Doralynn Kennedy (Indie author, 2025)
Genre: Fiction/Gothic Romance
Pages (print): 530
Via: Author request
Note: We received a complimentary copy of this book for honest review.
We’re picking up where we left off yesterday with a review of the second book in the three-novel collection, The Rum Runner: The Legend of Captain John Stewart. Here’s our review of Book One: Cliff House. (Kimber: I’d check that out, Toots. It’ll give ya some important back story.)
So, Mom and I? We figured we’d just dip a toe into Book One. Like, test the narrative waters. Then get to Book Two when we can. Cuz, our TBR pile looks kinda like Mount Rushmore these days. Or maybe the state of Alaska.
Just shows you what we know.
After finishing Book One, Cliff House, we were itchin’ to dive into Book Two, Rum Runners. Like, Do Not Pass Go. Do Not Collect $200. So, we did. The next day.
Yep, we thoroughly enjoyed Cliff House. But guess what, Cookie? Book Two, Rum Runners, is even better. I’ll let Mom ‘splain. Ya might want to buckle up.
He’s caught between the two things he loves most – the empire he’s built and the woman he loves. John Stewart is being pulled in opposite directions that he can’t reconcile in this sweeping gothic romance set on the New England Coast.
“Not all houses are for the living.”
John Stewart is an enigmatic kinda guy. Taciturn. Passionate. Mysterious. We kept seeing Jay Gatsby. Or maybe Edmond Dantes. And a little of James Clavell’s Dirk Struan of Tai-pan. A dash of Rhett Butler. And Stewart’s main squeeze in Book Two, nurse Ruth Wilson? We kept seeing Dickens’s Esther Summerson of Bleak House.
Well. Rum Runners opens 100 years before Book One. An exhausted nurse peers into a tempestuous sea in the midst of a raging storm, searching for any hint of shipwreck survivors. Survival is something Ruth Wilson knows well. Half her town is gone due to a deadly flu epidemic, including her family and most of her friends and neighbors. But in the raging storm she finds another survivor: Captain John Stewart.
“Revenge makes widows where it should only claim enemies.”
Once he’s healthy again, Stewart contacts Ruth and asks her to come to his Connecticut estate, Marshwood Manor, to care for his diabetic mother. Once there, Ruth meets the kindly and steady Dr. Michael Best (echoes of another Dickensian character, Tom Pinch of Martin Chuzzlewit.). Together, Ruth and the doctor oversee the Stewart matriarch’s care. The doctor asks for Ruth’s hand in marriage. She is touched by his kindness and quiet, unfettered steadiness. Ruth is also unsettled by “men with rifles in the roses” at Marshwood Manor. And what’s up with the little girl who isn’t really there?
“Ruth found herself suspended between the two: the quiet ward of Dr. Best, where one might count a lifetime in the faithful return of spring blossoms; and the reckless blaze of John Stewart, where one might live a single year and yet feel it outweighed all others.”
Ruth chooses to join John Stewart at the new house he’s building on a cliff in Maine. And “The promise she gave a dying woman was a chain that pulled tighter the more he disappeared.” Can Ruth keep her promises to John’s dying mother without losing her own soul?
“She thought she wanted glitter. What she really wanted was grace.”
Book Two explains how and why John Stewart got into rum running. And the origins of Cliff House, which is really two houses. Cliff House above is all show. Chandeliers. Polished wood. A band and a ballroom. Cliff House below is hidden doors. Narrow, slick staircases. Deliveries at odd hours. Shadows. And while Cliff House remains a formidable character in Book Two, it’s not as central as it was in Book One. So, make sure you read both, okay?
The tone of Rum Runners differs a bit from Cliff House. The latter is more cerebral. There’s plenty of action in Rum Runners. For example, after a duel to the death over smuggling supremacy, Stewart’s criminal empire grows. It spreads from Main to Chicago, “from coast to coast: bribes paid, rivals buried, men bought for loyalty or silence.”
We loved how the author weaves echoes of Book One throughout Book Two: A woman in pink. Mercy with a mouth like a trap. A cup with three drops. A flask and water from a cavern pool. One, two, three. One, two, three.
“Memory is an animal that will not be tamed.”
As in Cliff House, superb writing and skillful storytelling are the watchwords for Rum Runners. The author’s metaphors remain as sharp as a chisel carving stone. Her similes sparkle like embers in the dark. The narrative makes readers feel like we’re tip-toeing into a shadowy world of secrets where faint whispers curl through cracks in the walls and floorboards are full of breaths held too long.
The story races forward with the precision of a seasoned conductor, keeping the beat tight and the tension high. It’s a brisk, expertly paced journey where every word is a deliberate choice, every scene a calculated advance.
And… we’re not through yet! Be sure to keep an eye out for our review of Book Three: Scavengers. Coming TOMORROW!
Pages & Paws 