The Blackthorn Signal Conspiracy
A 1930s Boarding School Techno-Thriller

About this book:

At Blackthorn Academy, the curriculum includes Latin, algebra, and the physics of the impossible. It’s 1934, and the Yorkshire moors hide more than peat and heather—they hide a signal that shouldn't exist. When brilliant, eccentric physics master Alistair Finch turns the school’s legendary Iron Tower into a colossal radio array, he and his most promising student, Julian Croft, tune into a broadcast defying the laws of nature: a mechanically perfect pulse originating not from the ionosphere, but from the desolate hills just miles away. As the school’s own iron girders and steam pipes begin to vibrate in sympathy with the transmission, the boys realize their isolated boarding school has become the receiver for something vast, deliberate, and terrifyingly close.

The mystery deepens when a young master with a war record and a War Office cipher log is caught monitoring the tower, and the headmaster’s silence speaks louder than his reprimands. Dragged into a conspiracy that weaponizes the cutting edge of thermionic valve technology, Julian and his circle of mismatched friends— a cartographer’s son, a foundry heir, a rifle captain, and a irrepressible wit—must navigate prefects, prep, and the freezing dark of the moors to decode the "Blackthorn Signal." But the transmitter is switching faster than any human machine can manage, and the carrier wave is whispering through the radiators in the dormitories at night.

*The Blackthorn Signal Conspiracy* fuses the claustrophobic charm of a classic boarding school novel with the high-stakes tension of a vintage techno-thriller. It is a story of vacuum tubes and vacuum-sealed secrets, where the static between stations hides a war the world doesn't know has begun. For readers who love the atmospheric dread of *The Secret History* wired into the inventive pulse of *The Imitation Game*, this is a frequency you won't want to tune out.