Today, we’re pleased to present an excerpt from Before We Died, the first book in Joan Schweighardt’s Rivers Trilogy.

The excerpt opens in 1907, in Hoboken, New Jersey. Irish American brothers Jack and Baxter Hopper hope to leave their jobs working on the docks of Hoboken so as to travel to the South American rainforest to become rubber tappers. But they must first find a patron who will pay for their ship passage and the supplies they’ll need. It is Baxter who travels across the river to New York to meet with Abalo, a potential patron, and Jack, the narrator of Before We Died, who describes Baxter’s telling of how the interview went.