Prohibition didn’t last forever, but it created a lively bootlegging enterprise in the Pacific Northwest while it ruled the land.

Award-winning Seattle area writer Denise Frisino taps into that bygone era as the setting of her debut novel, “Whiskey Cove: Running Wild—Running Whiskey”, a fast paced and entertaining work of historical fiction set in the San Juan Islands and Bellingham.

The heart of the narrative?

An unsolved murder and a young female college student who, unwittingly, stumbles upon dangerous secretes of the past.

Frisino, a former English, drama and writing teacher, and recipient of an A+ Award for Excellence in Education, will be at Griffin Bay Bookstore to read from and sign copies of her first work of fiction, Saturday, Oct. 6, at 7 p.m.

The event is cosponsored by Griffin Bay and San Juan Island Library.

In Whiskey Cove, a 2012 PNBA Book Award nominee, Frisino explores the many changes that The Noble Experiment to society, as told from the viewpoint of an older woman, through the eyes of Alexandria McKenzie, who ran illegal booze with her husband, Jake. She hires a young college student, Jean, as summer help, and the innocent job that Jean begins ends, unexpectedly, by exposing a shady, secretive and perilous past.

Frisino, a fourth-generation Pacific Northwesterner, formerly an actress, writer, playwright and producer working in the theater and film industries in Los Angeles and in Seattle, has earned awards for both acting and writing. Her father, Joseph Frisino, was an editor and journalist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

She and her husband live aboard one of the old Mosquito Fleet boats, on Seattle’s Lake Union.

For info, Griffin Bay, 378-5511, www.griffinbaybook.com; library, 378-2798, www.sjlib.org.