"Make sure you're not cuttin' through the plate. See, Sonny, sometimes the barnacles are the only things holding these old tubs together." The old man lowered his goggles and danced a finger on the steel. "Of course, busting through the hard stuff is the only way to find out." Detective Patricia Wiacek has one last chance. She's down on the southern reaches of the Elizabeth River, trapped by a gang of killers desperate to get the bricks of uncut heroin she's hauling through the snowbound woods. Her only hope is to make for the creosoted deadlands of Money Point, where ghosts are waiting. Money Point is a tale of crime and redemption set along the Norfolk waterfront in 1973. From beat-down shipyard bars like the Tip Top and One Eyed Jack's, to the steamy depths of freighters riding anchor out along Thimble Channel, to the dark passages of creeks and rivers that cut through a land that can be at once so hard and yet so tender. With characters like Easy Pete, Sugarboy, Sweet Vonnie Harp, Chicazola, Catpaw and Chinese Billy, Money Point sails back through a time of drugs, war, disco, rationed gasoline, diminished faith. And it carries Pat Wiacek to that place of a rather simple question: what is justice? Money Point is pure crime noir set in Virginia's Tidewater. It continues with places and characters from Will Hopkins's previous novels, Willowood, Full Fathom Five and Miss Nike Ajax, and introduces a new character in Pat Wiacek, a veteran Chicago Police detective who has come to Norfolk because she is, in a dark way, another casualty of the Viet Nam war. Local lore says that Money Point is haunted by the ghost of Blackbeard, who was rumored to have buried his treasure there. How will Wiacek confront her own ghosts and demons out on those shores?
