The Conservator's Reverse Ledger
A Novel of Medieval Fragments and Modern Unmaking

About this book:

In the damp basement of a London museum, conservator Stephen Hitchcock catalogs the Thames Trench Deposit in reverse—starting with the last object pulled from the river mud and working backward toward the secret at the bottom. Each medieval pilgrim badge he places under his microscope carries more than centuries of corrosion: a scalpel slash across a saint's face filled with arterial-red wax, a synthetic blue fiber trapped in fourteenth-century lead, a maker's mark that belongs to no recorded guild. His director wants clean paperwork and a quiet acquisition. The missing colleague whose voice crackles through a burner phone wants him to keep digging. And the deeper Stephen works through the numbered accessions, the clearer it becomes that the hoard isn't a pious offering—it's a confession cast in contaminated metal.

Structured as a descending ledger of twenty-six accessions, *The Conservator's Reverse Ledger* fuses the precision of conservation science with the momentum of a literary thriller. Every chapter peels back a layer of forgery, revealing a trail that runs from the Dissolution's melting pots to a modern conspiracy that has already claimed one scholar's career—and possibly her life. Hitchcock's bench becomes a crime scene where X-ray fluorescence reads like fingerprinting, and the river's anaerobic silence speaks louder than any witness.

For readers who love the archival obsession of *The Name of the Rose*, the procedural texture of Tana French, and the buried histories of Sarah Moss, this is a novel about what survives in the silt—and who decides which stories get preserved.