The Keel Breaks at Midnight
A San Francisco Shipyard Mystery

About this book:

San Francisco, 1851: a city built on mud, gold, and abandoned ships, where ambition rots as fast as green timber in the bay. Caleb Thorne has spent thirty-five years coaxing forests into hulls that can survive Cape Horn, but the clipper rising on his slipway—the *Sovereign of the Seas*—is being murdered before she ever touches water. Acid in the rigging. Vitriol in the launch grease. A yard dog poisoned, a workman assaulted, and a shadow slipping away into the Mission Bay fog with a marlinspike in his hand. Thorne's merchant backer demands an impossible launch date; his rivals in the Law Line circle like sharks; and every caulker, shipwright, and rigger in the yard has a motive to see the great ship fail.

With the tides turning against him and a fracture spreading through the keel that no carpenter's art can explain, Thorne must navigate a waterfront where land is made of scuttled hulls, justice is bought in silver, and the line between bad luck and cold-blooded sabotage wears thin as a caulked seam. *The Keel Breaks at Midnight* launches a masterful historical mystery series steeped in the tar, sweat, and salt of a golden age of sail—where the wood remembers every hand that shaped it, and the truth lies buried beneath the tallow.