The Tally Clerk of Salthouse Quay
A Victorian Romantic Suspense Novel

About this book:

Bramley Vance does not see cargo; he sees equations. As the tally clerk of Salthouse Quay, his world is balanced in ink and ledger lines—until a Swedish barque discharges a phantom crate marked *X-9* under cover of fog. The manifest says it doesn't exist. The harbor master's forged stamp says otherwise. And the silk-hatted aristocrat who catches Bramley watching from the shadows makes it clear: some numbers are worth killing to keep unbalanced.

Dragged from his quiet obsessions into a conspiracy that threads through coal barges, canal locks, and the gilded parlors of Liverpool's elite, Bramley finds an unlikely ally in a woman whose distress rings clearer than any witness statement. She belongs to the world above the docks; he belongs to the grime below. But as the missing crate pulls them deeper into a trade far deadlier than smuggled iron, their only proof lies in Bramley's meticulous records—and the growing certainty that the next discrepancy in the ledger will be written in blood.

*The Tally Clerk of Salthouse Quay* is a Victorian romantic suspense where arithmetic is a weapon, fog conceals more than the river, and a man who refuses to let a single figure lie becomes the most dangerous witness on the Mersey.