Midnight Tide at Blackwater Quay
A Novel of Vice and Virtue

About this book:

The fog off the Solway Firth doesn't roll—it crawls, thick with brine, coal smoke, and the secrets of Blackwater Quay. When Inspector Silas Drake hauls a clerk's body from the black water, the corpse tells a terrible story: three precise knife wounds, flesh scorched purple by vitriol, and pockets turned inside out. The man carried a tin cylinder from the *Iron Duchess*. Now the cylinder is gone, a false manifest hides a hold full of iron and saltpeter, and the Dock Company's shadow men are sniffing the tide for witnesses.

Jonas Brand, a retriever who plies his trade between the pilings and the Rookery's gin-shops, saw the killers from beneath Pier Three. He also scraped the chemical grease they left behind. Twenty sovereigns wait for anyone who learns what the dead clerk was carrying—but in a port where steam winches scream and corrupt coppers wear soot-blackened buttons, curiosity buys a one-way trip to the breakwater with a stone around your ankles.

Drake knows Jonas watched. Jonas knows Drake saw him. Neither trusts the other, but the powder keg in the *Iron Duchess*'s hold doesn't care about honor among thieves or copper's oaths. As the tide turns and the fog lifts, an honest policeman and a water-rat thief will chase a conspiracy from the mortuary slab to the harbor master's locked ledger—because in Blackwater Quay, the only thing deeper than the silt is the rot at the heart of the trade.