The Ward Maid's Night Shift Heist
A Novel of Gaslight and Laudanum

About this book:

In the gaslit bowels of St. Jude’s Hospital, the carbolic acid cannot mask the scent of desperation. Maud Ryan scrubs floors with hands cracked by lye and years, invisible to the doctors, the nurses, and the dying—until a wealthy miser arrives in a private hansom, clutching a brass-bound mahogany box to his chest. Croft is fading fast, and when he dies, the Matron’s ledger will swallow his fortune whole. Maud needs thirty pounds by Saturday to buy her sister’s freedom from a Whitechapel tallyman; the box holds her only way out. But the lock is a Bramah, the key hangs on a cord around a dying man’s neck, and the night shift is a gauntlet of corrupt nurses, laxative-draught schedules, and a House Surgeon who signs death certificates before the breath leaves the body.

Maud has until dawn to pull off the impossible: a heist in a ward of twenty-four witnesses, where the floorboards squeak, the gas jets hiss, and the night porter drinks himself unconscious in the coal cellar. Every chapter tightens the tourniquet—ether spills, shifting shadows, a locksmith’s needle fashioned from a hairpin, and the terrifying clarity of a man who refuses to die on schedule. *The Ward Maid's Night Shift Heist* is a masterclass in Victorian noir, steeped in the reek of gangrene and laudanum, where the line between salvation and the mortuary slab is measured in heartbeats and half-crowns.