The Lloyd's Man on the Clyde

About this book:

Glasgow, 1892. The Clyde is the iron forge of Empire, where ten thousand men hammer leviathans from steel and smoke—and where a surveyor's ink can sink a fortune faster than any torpedo. Thomas Alexander arrives at the Broomielaw to assess a routine insurance claim on the wrecked *Gaelic Queen*, but the fractured plates of her hull whisper a different story: deliberate sabotage, drilled deep into the ship's backbone before she ever met the rocks. As a bitter strike paralyzes the yards and the river rises with fury, Thomas finds himself hunted through drydocks and mold lofts by men who measure profit in blood and silence.

From the soot-blackened offices of Lloyd's to the rat-infested bilges of a dying ship, *The Lloyd's Man on the Clyde* plunges you into a world where metallurgy meets murder, and the line between a total loss and a tidy payout is drawn in chalk on a keelson. Thomas's calipers and pocket watch are his only weapons against a conspiracy that binds shipowners, foremen, and the city's most powerful syndicate—all desperate to bury the truth beneath the next launch.

Atmospheric, technically precise, and relentlessly paced, this is Victorian industrial noir at its finest: a locked-room mystery inside a hull the size of a cathedral, where every rivet hides a lie and the fog on the Clyde conceals a killer waiting for the tide to turn.