The Fever Road of Black Isle
A medieval medical thriller

About this book:

When the tide drops, the Crossing appears—a slimy spine of cobbles linking Black Isle to the mainland. For six hours, the island breathes: merchants, drovers, and carriers haul wool, salt, and secrets across the mud. Then the sea swallows the road again, and the island is alone.

Apothecary’s apprentice Luke Vance has seen every illness the Firth can bring. But the carrier who stumbles ashore coughing yellow froth streaked with blood, his horses collapsing in the gatehouse mud, carries something that doesn’t belong in any leechbook. The smell clings to the wagon canvas: sweet, rotting apples beneath the wool and tallow. By nightfall, the harbor porters are gasping in the fog, their lips turning black as bruised plums. The bailiff’s gout is the least of Master Gidney’s worries now.

Trapped between the tides with a contagion that moves faster than the rising water, Luke must trace the poison back to its source—through the smugglers’ caves, the merchant ledgers, and the sealed leper house on the marsh—before the Spine Road becomes a funeral procession. On Black Isle, the cure is buried in the mud. And the tide is coming in.