Tommy Marshall is a blue-blooded American Prince - he grew up in Locust Valley, Long Island's Gold Coast, and has just graduated from St. Stephens, four years in New Hampshire playing hockey and lacrosse and earning grades Yale will find sufficient, given the long line of Marshall's who've preceded him and their generous contributions to the endowment. The weekend following graduation finds him in Tuxedo Park for a house party thrown by a classmate, but he arrives to an empty house - except for the girl. Mary's only sixteen, but her looks and confidence are of another age, and they drive off an hour after meeting. As the drive continues they fall deeper and deeper in love, through a moonlit night in Mantoloking, to a magical evening on Maryland's Eastern Shore, to the mystery of Charleston, and finally to Savannah, where the sojourn comes to an abrupt end. Six years and a surprise reunion later find Tommy an entitled entrepreneur whose dabbling in drugs trouble Mary, now a medical student. They fight, inviting tragedy of the worst kind, and Tommy, alone and adrift, sinks into hopeless addiction, seeking comfort and companionship in Latin America's ex-pat community. Returning to America, his downward spiral is accelerated by a huge inheritance. Recovery comes slow and hard as Tommy learns life's lessons for the first time, and with redemption comes an event so profound and stunning it can only be attributed to grace. Isle Of Shoals is an intimate look at a world gone by, a world where a person's last name determined their destiny, where money and power was a birthright, and a world new money could visit but never belong, because the harder the effort, the more difficult the realization. Above all it's a story about love, a story about a boy and a girl who knew they belonged together for all time the moment they met, only to discover that time was the one thing they couldn't have.