The Wharf Rat's Ledger
A Port City Western

About this book:

San Mira isn't a city—it's a machine built on pilings and bad credit, where the tide washes up bodies faster than the coroner can write receipts. Harbor assessor Elias Vance knows every rotting timber, every smuggler's ledger, and every official with a price. When a dead derrick-hand turns up wedged in the cribbing with a rice-paper manifest sewn into his boot heel, Vance pulls a thread that unravels a conspiracy stretching from the opium-laden decks of the *Mary Belle* to the marble offices of the Custom House. Armed with a lead-weighted walking stick and a harbor policeman's badge he trusts only as far as he can throw it, he has until slack water to prove the kingpin's empire runs on blood before the next tide buries the evidence.

John Garske owns the wharves, the warehouses, and half the lawmen paid to watch them. He didn't get there by leaving loose ends—but he never accounted for a man who reads manifests like scripture and treats a shattered barrel of Turkish gum-leaf as a declaration of war. Now the harbor's gone quiet: gates locked, ledgers burned, scows drifting out on the ebb with holds full of secrets. With his nephew Roy watching his back and a harbor cop named Hattie playing both sides, Vance has twenty-six chapters of rising water to turn a single blue-lined tally sheet into a noose—assuming the mudflats don't swallow them all first.

Gritty, tidal, and steeped in the smell of coal smoke and creosote, *The Wharf Rat's Ledger* is a port-city western where the frontier ends at the waterline and justice is just another cargo to be weighed, measured, and sometimes thrown overboard.