The Midnight Rivet Mystery

About this book:

When the dawn whistle blows over Blackwood Shipyard, it usually summons eight hundred men to the rhythm of rivet hammers and furnace smoke. Today, it only witnesses the aftermath: foreman Arthur Pendelton lies cold beneath the towering ribs of Hull 409, a single brass rivet—polished, ornamental, and utterly out of place on a cargo liner—clenched in his frozen fist. The yard’s superintendent wants the body covered and the shift running; the new shift supervisor, Elias Vane, checks his pocket watch and orders the men back to work. But Clara Whitby, one of the few women to earn a riveter’s wage on the slipways, knows the physics of a fall doesn’t match the wound on Arthur’s temple, and she knows the brass in his palm didn’t come from any hull plate.

Armed with a tool belt, a sixteen-year-old heater boy, and a mind that reads steel like scripture, Clara stays on the scaffold. She has until the sunset whistle to navigate a yard where union men whisper of sabotage, management counts penalties by the hour, and every long-coated figure in the mist—draughtsman, director, or supervisor—moves with a secret. The clue is small enough to hide in a vest pocket, but it pulls a thread that unravels blueprints, payroll ledgers, and the dangerous geometry of a ship built on lies.

In a world measured in foot-pounds and piece-rates, Clara drives rivets by day and chases shadows by night, climbing gantries and crawling through double bottoms to prove that Arthur’s death wasn’t an accident—it was a calculation. *The Midnight Rivet Mystery* is a gritty, atmospheric historical thriller where the clang of iron rings with suspicion, and one woman’s steady hand may be the only thing that keeps the truth from sinking with the tide.