The Oyster Wars carries the reader through a turbulent period, immediately following the Civil War when Chesapeake Bay watermen fought to the death over oysters, or "white gold", as some called the bay's most precious resource.

It is a time in our history when young men in the Chesapeake Bay area were shanghaied and often held in a remote prison, known in the day as a "paddy shack," before being sold into servitude to a ruthless oyster boat captain.

On All-Hallows Eve, 1867, Landon Crockett Wallis is kidnapped from the waterfront of Baltimore's Fells Point.

Haynie McKenna, a former Union soldier, agrees to search the marshes and woods of Somerset County, Maryland in an effort to free Wallis.

McKenna's race to find the "paddy shack" where Wallis is held, pits him against Rat,an ex-Rebel sharpshooter; the malevolent Drumm brothers, a cabal of former Confederate officers struggling to resurrect the Confederate cause and his own family ghosts.

The author weaves historical fact into a fast-paced narrative of Haynie McKenna's struggle to free the Wallis boy and bring some justice to The Chesapeake Bay.