Joey Madden, the eleven-year-old narrator of Ruin Creek, is Joe now, a twenty-eight-year-old, Duke-trained anthropologist back on the Outer Banks doing ethnographic fieldwork in Little Roanoke, a traditional fishing community under stress from modernization. Attending services at Little Roanoke's evangelical church, Joe secures a berth aboard a commercial trawl boat called the Father's Price. Between trips to sea, Joe crosses paths with Day Shaughnessey, MD, an OB/GYN whose provision of birth and abortion services to local island women has put her in the crosshairs of the conservative community Joe has come to study. In the same family summer house where Joe once lived the painful end of his parents' marriage, his relationship with Day now begins. As they converge romantically, however, Joe and Day increasingly diverge on politics. If those who can't remember the past are condemned to repeat it, it's Joe and Day's fate-and Joe's, in particular-- to learn that those who can't forget the past are oftentimes condemned to repeat it, too.