The Rat-Catcher of Seville
A 1620s Port Noir

About this book:

Seville, 1626. The Guadalquivir chokes on the empire's wealth—Mexican silver, Peruvian cocoa, and the filth of a city that feeds on both. When a black-sailed carrack drifts silently into the King's Wharf without colors, without crew, and without a sound, rat-catcher Ignacio Silva knows the real cargo isn't in the holds. It's in the sewers. The rats are fleeing upstream by the thousands, their eyes milky with something that doesn't belong in the dark. Something white and filamentous is growing through centuries of brick and bone, pulling the city's vermin into a single, hungry mind.

Ignacio has spent a lifetime mapping the honeycomb beneath Seville's cobblestones—Roman culverts, Moorish arches, Inquisition pits. He knows which grates breathe and which swallow men whole. But he's never seen the stone itself dissolve into pale dust, or dead rats woven into living tapestries by hair that drinks blood. With a lame apprentice, a brace of ferrets, and a hook-pole that's felled a thousand plague-carriers, he descends into the Rotunda of the Drowned to find a corpse wearing a collar of white fur that *moves*—and something vast, pale, and humming in the dark behind it.

Above, the ship waits. Its deck is coated in grey powder. Three-toed tracks lead from the hold to the gangplank. And the fog rolling off its hull carries the scent of ancient salt, cold stone, and unburied meat. In a city built on stolen gold and buried sins, the bill has come due. *The Rat-Catcher of Seville* is historical noir at its most visceral—a descent into the rot beneath the golden age, where the only law is survival, and the things in the dark have teeth.