Inspired by Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, Rules Weaken Near Salt Water carries Austen's wit and romantic tension into Jazz Age New York and windswept Cape Cod. It's a novel about grief and reinvention, the gulf between charm and character, and what it costs to build a life instead of inheriting one.

New York City, 1922. Eleanor Whitmore has spent twenty-four years learning to watch rather than be watched—the eldest daughter of a shipping magnate, composed and capable, while her vivid sister Marian chases beauty and their father builds an empire neither daughter may touch.

Then their father dies, and everything Eleanor understood about her family's security dies with him. A half-brother with designs on the estate, a fortune far less certain than promised, and three women cast out of society altogether. Broke and grieving, Anne, Eleanor, and Marian arrive in the small Cape Cod town of Westhaven with nothing certain ahead.
What they find instead is everything.

Eleanor discovers work she's brilliant at, and a friendship with the quietly formidable Colonel William Fairfax, a man guarding secrets as deep as the Atlantic beyond his estate. Marian learns that beauty isn't only something to admire, but something to build—and that the dazzling man capturing her heart this summer may be nothing like he appears. And Anne, who went from her father's house to her husband's, begins discovering who she is when no one needs her to be anyone at all.

The rules for well-bred women do weaken near salt water. What's left is something better: women who no longer need the rules to know exactly who they are.