The Lock-Keeper's Backward Current
A Canal Espionage Novel in Reverse

About this book:

They hanged the lock-keeper at dawn on a frozen canal, the rope scented with tar and the water dead calm beneath the gallows. Silas Thorne went to his death branded a traitor—seller of Crown dispatches, destroyer of the *Black Heron*, murderer of a Revenue officer. But the three halfpence in his pocket told a different story to Assistant Investigator Jasper Vance. So did the leather diary fished from the weir, its entries running backward from the day of arrest: November 28, November 27, November 26... each page a meticulous log of tolls paid, signals given, crates moved in the lock chamber, sovereigns passed behind a clock face. Thorne didn't record a conspiracy; he recorded a schedule. And the schedule implicates the very men who signed his death warrant.

Vance follows the current upstream, against the flow of time and the canal's own geometry. Each chapter pulls the reader deeper into the past—through frost-locked cuts and summer droughts, past the sinking of the ordnance barge and the forged manifest, back to the first sluice-gate and the spring thaw that started it all. The canal network is the circulatory system of an empire built on iron and gunpowder; Lock Nine is its choke point. Thorne was not the mastermind but the gatekeeper, and his reverse diary is a map drawn in water, weight, and silence. To read it forward is to watch a trap close. To read it backward is to see who built it.

Atmospheric, ingenious, and steeped in the grime and grandeur of 1845's industrial waterways, *The Lock-Keeper's Backward Current* inverts the espionage novel the way a lock inverts a river: the ending is given, the beginning is the mystery, and every chapter turns the mechanism one notch further toward the source. For readers who love the precise historical texture of Patrick O'Brian, the structural daring of *The Night Watch*, and the canal-noir mood of *The Tenderness of Wolves*—this is a voyage you take against the current, where the truth waits at the headwaters.