It's 1943, and Mobile, Alabama, is a wartime boomtown under siege by thousands of newcomers who have left the backwoods and overworked cotton fields to seek their fortune in the city's bustling shipyards. Shantytowns and tent cities are erected to shelter those who aren't crammed into every available room and boarding house. Schools work in shifts but can't meet the demand; garbage and sewage problems cause rumors of typhoid, and out on the streets, young women are disappearing. In the absence of success by the city's undermanned and overworked police force to get leads on a white slavery ring, the fate of the missing women depends on the efforts of three people with different motives: private investigator Frank Lundy, a football legend who's 4-F and sensitive about it; police reporter Valerie Gilbreath, a former debutante and Mardi Gras queen just beginning her newspaper career; and Alfred Page, an AWOL black soldier targeted for murder by a manic swamp dweller who comes to town with revenge on his mind and supports himself by doing dirty work for the kidnapping ring. There's one thing they all agree on: Sally McGinn never should have gone down to the neon district on a school night.

Annalisa's Highway Blues is a romantic comedy that asks the question, "Can a prom queen learn to drive an 18-wheeler and, during her first week on the road, capture the heart of a handsome Chicago industrialist?" The answer is "yes, but..." Despite their contentious first meeting, Mike Cindik is absolutely captivated by this exotic, strange-talking, truck driving Louisiana girl and he pursues her across the Midwestern interstate system with great difficulty and determination (guilt and fear, too, since he's engaged to a very manipulative and influential debutante). Annalisa Rochon is pretty but humble, with traditional family values and a naughty streak. Life on the road is full of danger, hard work and loneliness, but she has to do it for six months to help her parents (who think she's a flight attendant) through a financial crisis. She really doesn't need a guy like Mike Cindik (cute, rich, kind of nice and completely out of her league) complicating her life, which is screwed up enough. The pesky fairy tale dream persists, though, and generates a series of unlikely adventures, misadventures, romantic misses and near misses for two people from vastly different worlds who are actually quite right for each other.