“Lowcountry Surrender" Some betrayal cuts so deep it reshapes your entire world—but sometimes, the wreckage reveals exactly who you were always meant to be. Behind the iron gates and fragrant gardens of Charleston's storied antebellum mansions, Harvard-educated environmental attorney Sheilagh McCarthy is quietly rebuilding her life. Separated from her husband—the smooth-talking, old-money Congressman Sanford Calhoun III, Sheilagh has retreated to the palatial Calhoun ancestral home to rediscover herself, and decide her next move. Then one sun-drenched morning in White Point Garden, she encounters a tousled, sun-bronzed Navy veteran feeding peanuts to a squirrel—and everything changes. Alex Traina is the kind of man Charleston admires: honest, quietly confident, and utterly unpretentious. He runs a thriving stall of colorful Balinese fashions and exotic crafts at the historic Charleston City Market, designs women's clothing with an artist's eye, and lives alone in a modest marsh-side cottage on James Island—a home that once felt achingly empty after the loss of both parents. Alex has built a good life from grief and loneliness. What he hasn't built is love. And when the intriguing woman from the park appears the next afternoon at his market stall, their connection is immediate, electric, and complicated by everything they haven't yet told each other. When Sheilagh's identity comes to light—wife of the very congressman whose corruption reaches from the marble corridors of Capitol Hill to the sun-scorched Arizona desert—the tender new romance is tested before it has truly begun. But Sheilagh is no political trophy. She is a woman reclaiming her voice. And when her attorney Edward Nicholson uncovers evidence that Sandy has been accepting bribes to fast-track EPA approval for a rare earth mineral processing facility at the Aznexus copper mine, bypassing environmental safeguards under the guise of national security, Sheilagh’s instincts as an environmental advocate ignite with fierce purpose. What follows is a masterful collision of passion and principle, deception and courage, as Sheilagh and Alex travel to the vast open-pit mine in southern Arizona, consult a whistleblowing engineer who fears for his family's safety, and begin unraveling a web of corruption that stretches from hidden Cayman Islands bank accounts to millions in untraceable cryptocurrency—all flowing through a South Carolina law firm whose senior partner is Sandy's closest friend. Sandy, meanwhile, is not a man who accepts defeat gracefully. Enraged by his estranged wife's new relationship, he unleashes the full force of his political connections against Alex. Lowcountry Surrender is a richly layered novel of romantic suspense and political intrigue, set against the luminous backdrop of Charleston, South Carolina. It is the story of two wounded, honorable people who find each other. It is the story of a corrupt politician whose arrogance blinds him to the forces gathering against him. And it is the story of a team of loyal friends—a quick-witted market employee, a tech-savvy fiancé, a resourceful law student, a motorcycle-collecting political science major, and a sharp-tongued Charleston attorney descended from a Founding Father—who quietly, brilliantly, help bring a powerful man to justice. What makes Surrender singular is its refusal to choose between the intimate and the epic. The novel moves seamlessly from the sensual warmth of a marsh-side home at moonrise to the cold fluorescent tension of an FBI interrogation room; from the gentle creak of a catamaran's hull at anchor to the chaos of a federal raid in a penthouse condominium. Throughout, the romance between Sheilagh and Alex deepens with each shared danger, each moment of hard-won honesty, each quiet evening watching the tidal marsh breathe in the fading light.
