The Bell Tower Broadcast
A Magical Realism Novel

About this book:

When the Black Death creeps across the Norfolk fens in 1347, the bells of Saint Jude-in-the-Fens don't just toll for the dead—they *record* them. Brother Corvus, the abbey's reclusive bell-keeper, discovers that a mad German founder carved a spiral groove deep inside the great bell *Vox Dei*, turning bronze into a wax cylinder seven centuries before Edison. As plague victims breathe their last against the cloister stones, the tower itself becomes a phonograph, etching dying confessions, final prayers, and the terrible truth of what arrived on a Genoese cog into the very metal and mortar of the abbey.

Seven hundred years later, archivist Arthur Finch uncovers a fractured shard of that bell in a climate-controlled basement. When he runs a laser profilometer over its corroded groove—treating medieval bronze like a vinyl record—he hears the voice of a monk whispering through the static of centuries: *Corvus, hold the bone true. The sickness is in the breath, but the bell will keep the voice when the tongue is black.* But the bell was only the microphone. The cloister columns, the very stones of the abbey, caught the low-frequency rumble of history: the thud of a dying man's head against the wall, the vibration of the earth itself.

As Arthur and his colleague Mary race to recover the remaining fragments before a construction crew crushes them into road-fill, the past and present begin to resonate at a dangerous frequency. Something in those grooves doesn't just want to be heard—it wants to be answered. *The Bell Tower Broadcast* is a haunting fusion of historical fiction and speculative mystery, where acoustics become archaeology, grief becomes groove, and the dead have been waiting a very long time for someone to play them back.