The Quartermaster's Boy

About this book:

Seventeen-year-old Will Finch arrives at Depot Seven with a duffel bag, a falsified age, and a dollar-twenty-a-day contract to count the rotting surplus of a war that ended before he was old enough to fight. What he finds is a frozen city of crated pickaxes, moth-eaten wool, and ten thousand escort wagons waiting for horses that were sold off a decade ago—an empire of bureaucracy where the ledgers matter more than the reality inside the boxes. When the first crate reveals twenty-four pick heads instead of the stenciled twenty-five, Will learns the depot's first law: *The Army does not make mistakes in excess. It only makes mistakes in deficit.*

Caught between Sergeant Krum's hobnailed pragmatism, storekeeper Satterfield's terrifying precision, and old Toby's subversive "Ledger of Broken Things," Will discovers that every honest count is an act of rebellion—and every falsified tally is a bite taken from the civilian mess. In a place where British contract heads can't exist in Building Four, where convicts scrape cosmoline off artillery wheels, and where the quartermaster's boy climbs rotten bin floors because he's light enough not to fall through, survival means deciding which numbers you're willing to betray.

Atmospheric, sharp-edged, and alive with the smell of kerosene, wet wool, and cold iron, *The Quartermaster's Boy* is a masterwork of historical fiction that turns inventory into revelation. Here is the Depression-era home front as you've never seen it: not a backdrop, but a machine that grinds men into entries—and one boy's quiet refusal to let the paperwork win.