Award-winning novelist Tom Franklin and award-winning poet Beth Ann Fennelly have merged their talents to tell the stories of Dixie Clay Holliver, the best bootlegger in the county, and Ted Ingersoll, one half of the team of government agents on a secret assignment in 1927. 

With the Mississippi swollen to dangerous flood levels, the water crashing at the high levee walls and the rain unceasing, Ham Johnson and Ted Ingersoll, WWI vets and U.S. Government prohibition agents, have been diverted from their normal duties and sent to tiny Hobnob, Mississippi, where the river bends precariously. Two previous agents have disappeared on this assignment. A case of stolen dynamite is reportedly on its way to Hobnob. If a saboteur can blow the Hobnob levee, the town will flood, yet all the towns and cities from Jackson to New Orleans will be spared. Their mission, to find the dynamite and save the town, gets more complicated when the agents discover, in the aftermath of a crime, an abandoned baby. 

Enter Dixie Clay Holliver, the best bootlegger in the county. Her house, Sugar Hill, is several miles from Hobnob, in deep piney country, near the creek by her still. Her husband Jesse--charismatic, philandering, sometimes violent--distributes her whiskey. He is a man-about-town in local speakeasies, and someone she’s beginning to realize is a stranger. Dixie Clay has resigned herself to a life of solitude, making her perfect whiskey and mourning her own baby, who died two years before. The river continues to rise, and she continues to work. And then a stranger named Ingersoll brings her a baby. 

That’s when her troubles--and her joys--begin. And Ingersoll's.