Keeper of the Plague Road
A Gothic Novel

About this book:

On the wind-lashed spine of Blackwater Island, the Plague Road runs between salt marsh and quarry—a pathway where the dead are carried, the sick are abandoned, and the Searcher walks alone. Silas Vance holds the island's most reviled office: he alone may turn the corpses, pronounce the cause, and sign the ledger that seals a house behind the chalk cross of quarantine. When an old ropemaker dies with a needle-fine puncture through his heart, Silas writes a lie to keep the peace. Hours later, a young salt-drier convulses with an indisputable bubo. The Pestilence has returned, and a murderer walks the fog-bound lanes. Between the Bailiff's silence, the apothecary's secrets, and a daughter's grief, Silas must decide which truth will destroy them all.

Atmospheric and relentless, *Keeper of the Plague Road* weaves forensic gothic horror into a locked-island mystery where every chimney hides contraband, every ledger conceals a falsified entry, and the line between the Black Death and a killer's blade is measured in the width of a bodkin's point. For readers who crave the fog-choked dread of *The Terror* and the moral rot of *The Name of the Rose*, this is historical suspense at its most visceral—where the Searcher's oath binds him to the dead, but justice demands he betray the living.