The Ship Surgeon's Cow Barn Exile
A 1920s Coastal Veterinary Mystery

About this book:

Dr. Thomas Blackwood once held a lieutenant commander's commission and a surgeon's steel in the sickbay of the USS *Resolute*. Now he stitches cows in a leaking shanty on Penobscot Bay, stripped of rank, license, and country after a fire at sea became a court-martial's convenient lie. The Navy calls him a butcher. The Bureau of Investigation calls him a smuggler. The farmers of Hancock County just call him when the calving goes wrong—until a dead man's cipher arrives in the night, and a logbook that shouldn't exist lands in the mud at his boots.

Marcus Ward, Blackwood's former pharmacist's mate, swore the *Resolute*'s medical stores burned with the ship. Instead, two hundred cases of medicinal spirits, three gross of morphia, and forty-five Colt automatics vanished into the Maine fog—and Ward paid for the secret with two bullets behind the ear. Now the men who tortured him are rowing ashore at Dead Man's Cove, a revenue cutter waits off Eggemoggin Reach, and a federal agent with clean boots and a dirty theory is watching the coastal road. The only proof that Blackwood didn't sign the theft orders sits wrapped in oilcloth on his table: Commander Vance's private log, stained with Guantánamo depot stamps and the captain's own hand.

With a breech birth at midnight, a Dutch Belted heifer fighting for her life, and killers moving through the salt marsh under cover of a rising gale, Blackwood has until dawn to decide what he swore he'd never be again: the surgeon who knows where the bodies are buried, and the officer who knows how to fight a war in the dark.