Threads of the Long Con

About this book:

In the deafening heart of the Great Northern Weaving Mill, Edie Miller ties a weaver's knot in four seconds flat—fast enough to fool the overseer, fast enough to survive another shift. But the blue carbon slip tucked in her shoe isn't cotton waste; it's a death sentence for her brother. Three hundred sixty dollars. Three days. And the only way to raise it sits two floors above her loom: thirty thousand dollars in a Herring-Hall-Marvin safe, resting on pine sleepers that have begun to sigh under the weight.

Julian Finch doesn't believe in luck—only tensile strength, thermal expansion, and the predictable greed of men like Vanderveer. He's spent weeks mapping the mill's seams: the fire riser behind loom forty-two, the turnbuckle that drops the ceiling half an inch, the drill bits that can bite through chilled iron. He doesn't need a crew. He needs a woman who knows the rhythm of the machines, who can make the vibration work for her, who understands that when the warp fouls, you don't cut the web—you pull the knot through and keep the treadles moving.

Between them stands Leo Tremblay, an oiler who reads men like bearing wear, and Arthur Vance, a loan shark with brickyard enforcers and three-foot ash staves. The whistle blows at six. The payroll arrives Thursday. And somewhere in the lint-choked air, a red notebook holds elevations drawn in spider-silk ink. *Threads of the Long Con* spins a heist from the fibers of industrial desperation—where every clue is woven into the machinery, every ally has a price, and the strongest thread is the one that holds when everything else gives way.