The Fish Hold Cleaner
A Bering Sea Western

About this book:

Down in the lightless bilge of the *Albatross*, six feet below the freezing Bering Sea, hold cleaner Gus Vance scrapes a living off the rust and rot of other men's catches. He knows every groan of the hull, every slick of grease, every secret the steel keeps—until his shovel strikes something that doesn't belong in the sludge. A yellow rubber boot. A leg frozen inside it. And three letters scratched into the calf: *K-A-R*. The body has been entombed beneath the floorboards for years, weighted by fifty tons of fish and the silence of a crew that knows better than to ask questions.

Captain Gower wants the hold cleaned, the fish iced, and the boat pointed toward Dutch Harbor with a hold full of profit. He doesn't want a murder investigation four hundred miles from shore, and he sure as hell doesn't want his hold cleaner poking around frame forty-two. But Vance isn't a greenhorn—he's a man who reads the iron like scripture, and he knows the difference between an accident and a cover-up. With a gale closing in, the crew turning nervous, and the ship's own structure beginning to fail, Vance has until they make port to decide: walk away with his voucher, or drag the truth up from the dark before the sea swallows them all.

Atmospheric, brutal, and relentless as a winter swell, *The Fish Hold Cleaner* drops you into the most dangerous workplace on earth—where the cold preserves everything, the money buys silence, and the dead have a way of rising with the tide.