Taking Care of Cleo is both a mystery and a novel about caretaking and its insidious relationship to love within a family. In 1928, at the height of Prohibition, a beautiful 20 year old autistic woman repairs a wrecked yacht on the shores of a Lake Michigan resort town. She soon begins selling the liquor that she finds therein, attracting the violence of the infamous Purple Gang, the Jewish bootleggers of Detroit from the 1920s and 30s, against her family.