The Lock at Willow Bend
A Novel of the River Lea

About this book:

The River Lea in 1609 is a highway of grain and timber, ice and iron, ruled by men who know the weight of water and the price of silence. At Willow Bend, sixteen-year-old Giles tends a brutal flash lock with a mute, muscular grace, reading the river's moods in the tremor of a paddle and the scent of coming frost. He has built a life without words—until the winter of the Black Frost descends, bringing ice that crushes timber, a flood that rewrites the banks, and a girl fleeing her father's barge in a stolen punt, hurtling straight into the lock's white throat.

Hannah Blackthorn carries a compass, four silver shillings, and a ledger's knowledge of every toll and bribe between Ware and London. She also carries a death sentence if her father catches her before she reaches the tideway. As the Lea freezes solid and the King's engineers plot to straighten its wild curves into stone canals, Giles and Hannah are thrust into a current deadlier than any flood: a bargeman's vengeance, a lock-keeper's dying secrets, and a river that refuses to be tamed.

From the mud of the towpath to the freezing dark beneath the sluice gates, *The Lock at Willow Bend* is a visceral, transporting novel of labor and landscape, where survival depends on knowing which timbers hold and which souls can be trusted—and where the strongest current of all runs silent, deep, and utterly indifferent to the plans of men.