In 1962, after fleeing her charming, adulterous husband, Suzanne McTavish, desperately needs a job. Few exist in tiny Barkerville, tucked in the forests of Oregon's Cascades. Old Mr. Wilke at the White Water Bar & Grill wants pretty girls tending his bar-and much more. With twenty dollars in her pocket and knots in her stomach, she accepts his proposition. On her own for the first time, the naïve twenty-one year-old has much to learn about scoundrels when a handsome, mysterious stranger wiles his way into her world. Chaos descends when two hundred rowdy construction miners swagger into town with big money. Suzanne and her free-spirited sidekick, Karen, are quickly caught in the turbulence of politics, deceit and seduction. The hard-drinking men whose paths they cross are nothing like the loggers they grew up with. By summer's end, the two women, each with different ideas about how to behave in their booze-centered world, encounter difficult decisions concerning love and loyalty. Suzanne questions the life she's living at the White Water Bar & Grill, but only the shock of tragedy brings the clarity she needs to escape the whirlpool and move on to complete her emancipation.