About this book:

Commander Elias Thorne trades his Savile Row suit for a salt-stained apron, vanishing into the Portuguese White Fleet as "Elia Tordo"—a cook with a forged past and a miniature camera hidden in a tin of lard. His mission: hunt a Soviet signal buried deep in the fog-shrouded Grand Banks, where six thousand men haul cod from freezing depths and the Americans have looked the other way for too long. But the *Arctos* is a floating pressure cooker of superstition, brutality, and centuries-old tradition. The head cook guards his knives like state secrets. The captain would throw a spy overboard himself. And somewhere among the dorymen—alone in wooden boats miles from the mother ship—a ghost signal pulses through the night, too regular to be natural, too dangerous to ignore.

In a world where a bad stew invites scrutiny and a good one invites suspicion, Thorne must master the brutal alchemy of feeding sixty salt-crusted men while hunting a phantom in the radio static. The Soviets are listening to American submarines from the deck of a neutral ally's ship, and the only cover deep enough is the galley of a vessel that hasn't changed since the age of sail. But the White Fleet holds its own secrets: a young deckhand with eyes that move too fast, a handover in a Lisbon tavern that smelled of betrayal, and a rising storm that will trap them all in the Labrador Current with nowhere to run.

Atmospheric, claustrophobic, and steeped in the grime and glory of a vanished maritime world, *The Cook of the White Fleet* serves up Cold War espionage with a side of *bacalhau à Brás*—where the most dangerous weapon isn't a gun, but a paring knife, and the only thing colder than the North Atlantic is the truth.