The Gallows and the First Cast
A Reverse Heist on the 1600s Cod Fleet

About this book:

Four fishermen stand on a Plymouth gallows, condemned for stealing the King's Silver Cod—eighteen pounds of sterling that vanished from a locked cabin aboard the flagship *HM Sovereign* in a fog thick as lard. The High Sheriff has his signed warrants, the Admiralty has its trophy, and the crowd waits for the drop. But Captain Jonas Cobb isn't praying. He's calculating tides, reading the Sheriff's greed in the smudged ink of a falsified ledger, and trusting a wife who just rowed a lead-weighted decoy into the ebb current. The silver was never stolen. It was *placed*.

What follows is a reverse heist played out on the gray margins of the 1600s cod fleet: a desperate voyage back to the Grand Banks where the real ledger lies buried in a salt-house floor, a purser's drunkenness masks a deeper betrayal, and four dead men walking must outthink the Crown, the Customs, and the Dutch privateers waiting off the Scillies. Every chapter cuts between the scaffold's countdown and the voyage that put them there—deck-slick with guts and silver scales, rigging frozen to iron, and the quiet, terrible patience of men who know the sea always turns.

At its heart, this is a story about what gets weighed when the King's mark is missing: loyalty measured in fathoms, profit counted in salted cod, and a captain's final cast at dawn that might just buy back four lives from the deep.