About this book:

San Francisco corporate lawyer Silas Vance doesn't do dirt, ocean, or oil—three things Summerland, California, has in lethal abundance. When Standard Pacific Oil summons him to their offshore drilling colony to bury the "accidental drowning" of a roughneck named Hasty, Silas expects a tidy settlement and a fast train home. Instead, he finds a lawless city on stilts: wooden piers stretching hundreds of feet into the Pacific, derricks belching steam and sulfur over black tides, and fifty men who know the company's ledger is written in lies. The coroner called it misadventure. The superintendent calls it closed. But the dead man's boots sit waiting by the tool chest, a sabotaged boiler holds pressure like a bomb, and the roughnecks whisper that Hasty didn't fall—he was shoved.

Caught between directors who treat lives as ledger entries and workers who've stopped believing in justice, Silas begins inventing law where none exists. Maritime statutes don't reach the platforms. Civil codes don't govern men who live in grease and salt. As the fog rolls in and the midnight shift spins its deadly dance, Silas must navigate a world where evidence washes away with the tide, witnesses vanish into the kelp beds, and the only currency that matters is the truth—assuming he lives long enough to deliver it.

From the author of *The Rig's Reluctant Magistrate* comes a gritty historical thriller where the gavel is a sledgehammer, the courtroom is a swaying platform eighteen feet above shark-water, and the verdict comes written in crude and blood.