The Ratcliffe Reeve's Mistake

About this book:

London, 1340. The Thames runs thick with mud, blood, and the timber of a king's ambition. Bartholomew Miller, Reeve of the King's Works at Ratcliffe, has enough enemies without inviting more: French spies burning yards along the coast, corrupt suppliers shorting iron and oak, and a master shipwright who'd rather argue than build. When a hoist cable parts clean as a whipped cord—sabotaged, not strained—Bartholomew realizes the war has come upriver. Someone in his own yard is feeding the enemy, and the evidence points toward the one man he trusts: his silent, ink-stained clerk, Peter of St. Olave's.

With three great cogs due before the summer tides and the King's treasurers circling like sharks, Bartholomew must hunt a traitor through a shipyard of five hundred rough men, each with secrets to sell. The clues are written in ledger lines and severed hemp, in missing manifests and French coins dropped in the mud. But the deeper he digs, the clearer it becomes that the sabotage is only the beginning—and the next cut rope may carry his own name.

Atmospheric, gritty, and sharp as a caulker's blade, *The Ratcliffe Reeve's Mistake* plunges you into the smoke and salt of medieval shipbuilding, where loyalty is measured in tally-sticks and survival depends on reading between the lines of a ledger. For fans of C.J. Sansom and Ellis Peters, this is historical mystery at its most immersive—where the greatest threat to the fleet isn't the French across the Channel, but the knife in the dark at Ratcliffe.