"Brunella Cartolano is passionate and high-spirited, an accomplished architect and a daughter of the American West who tends to fall in love with lost causes. While she is trying to protect the Seattle waterfront from development, she also finds her father's vineyard east of the Cascade Mountains enduring the worst drought in history. Water is the base ingredient of winemaking, and for people who believe in the transformative power of wine, water has become the new petroleum - hoarded and stolen, the target of greed and the source of treachery, even among friends. Brunella struggles to protect her father's land from a mysterious force - someone who seems to be buying up all the water and driving away the people who work the land. When a wildfire roars out of control and kills a squadron of firefighters, the question of the lack of water becomes ever more urgent for Brunella."--BOOK JACKET.