The Bell Founder's Debt
A Novel of the Black Death

About this book:

In the shadow of Cologne's half-finished cathedral, journeyman bell-founder Lucas guards a secret that could destroy him: the clay core of the great bell *Great Peter* has cracked in the fire. With his master dying upstairs, a charcoal merchant chaining his fuel cart in the yard, and city guards seizing copper for a plague tax that may already be too late, Lucas has three days to patch a mold that holds five thousand pounds of bronze—and a dead man's reputation—before the guild hands the commission to a rival who waits with full coffers and clean hands.

The Black Death is crawling up the Rhine on the keels of trading ships, and the city's gates will soon shut tight. No tin from Saxony. No copper from Aachen. No escape. As the river empties and the first black swellings appear in the shambles, Lucas must coax a perfect tone from flawed earth, outwit the men circling his workshop, and pour a bell that will ring over a city that may not survive to hear it.

*Gritty, immersive, and forged in fire—The Bell Founder's Debt* is historical fiction at its most visceral: a novel of craft and catastrophe, where the line between a masterpiece and a ruin is measured in eggshells, iron wire, and the courage to stand before the furnace when the world goes dark.