The Scrivener of Blackwall Yard
A Legal Thriller of the 1620s

About this book:

London, 1628. The High Court of Admiralty reeks of wet wool, tobacco, and corruption—and Thomas Finch, a twenty-four-year-old clerk with ink-stained fingers and nine shillings a week, knows every current of its rot. When a scrap of parchment falls from a sealed file, revealing a receipt that contradicts a powerful merchant syndicate's sworn testimony, Thomas holds the proof that could save a shipmaster from ruin. But the men behind the lie—led by the ruthless Gabriel Lock of Blackwall Yard—have eyes everywhere, and in a world where justice is bought by the ounce, a clerk who speaks truth signs his own death warrant.

From the crowded well of the court to the fog-choked foreshore of Blackwall, Thomas is pulled into a conspiracy that reaches from the Guildhall to the Navy's victualling yards. With a hawk-faced enforcer tracking his movements and his own master, the venal Deputy Register Hext, ready to sell him out, Thomas must navigate a labyrinth of forged charter-parties, bottomry bonds, and dead men pulled from the Thames at Execution Dock. His only allies: a river pilot with a smugglers' past, a woman who runs a sanctuary in the Rookery, and a quill that writes faster than the law can silence it.

Rich in period detail and pulsing with the tides of the Thames, *The Scrivener of Blackwall Yard* is a legal thriller where the evidence is written in iron gall and the verdict is delivered by the river. For readers of C.J. Sansom and Robert Harris, here is a debut that turns the dusty machinery of Admiralty law into a weapon—and proves that in 1620s London, the most dangerous place to stand is between a merchant and his profit.