The Loom Room Verdict

About this book:

In the suffocating heat of a 1924 Massachusetts courtroom, company lawyer Arthur Vance watches the jury deliver a death sentence for Ethan Cross—a loom fixer accused of bashing an overseer's skull with a shuttle. The verdict is clean, the evidence airtight, and the mill owners satisfied. But when Vance finds the jury foreman's doodled ledger calculations in the jury box, a shuttle stained with fibers from a mill two hundred yards away, and the prosecution's star witness—a missing shift ledger—vanished from the evidence locker, the "clean" conviction begins to rot.

Haunted by the condemned boy's silence and the dead overseer's widow demanding her husband's missing red notebook, Vance descends into the labyrinth beneath Blackwood's brick towers: tenements where whispers carry secrets, canal banks where midnight meetings turn fatal, and executive parlors where ledgers balance in blood. Every thread he pulls—the jute in the cotton shuttle, the jury foreman's mortgage held by the mill, the overseer's promise to "get his share"—unravels a conspiracy woven into the very warp and weft of the town's economy.

With six weeks until the trapdoor opens, Vance must betray the corporation that pays his retainer, outmaneuver a prosecutor who owns the court, and decode a murder hidden in plain sight among the clatter of two thousand looms. In a town where justice is manufactured like sheeting—measured, cut, and sold by the yard—one company lawyer becomes the only man who can stitch the truth back together before the clock strikes twelve.