The Girl at Lock Twenty-Three

About this book:

Fourteen-year-old Martha tends Lock Twenty-Three alone, her uncle buried beneath the wild garlic and the toll ledger forged in his shaky hand. The canal company thinks Dan still runs the gate; the Cut-Riders smell weakness; and Silas Thorne's crimson narrowboat just slipped through carrying crates stamped with the Royal Ordnance mark beneath a tarp of stolen coal. By nightfall, a Company inspector rides the towpath asking questions, and the timber-men warn that Thorne's crew—led by the scarred Gideon Vance—will return upriver empty, hungry, and looking for witnesses.

Martha knows every groan of the iron hinges, every trick of the waterline, every lie that keeps the cottage door barred against the world. But the lock is failing—a bent hinge strap, a leaking paddle, a rising tide of secrets—and the isolated stretch of the Cut offers no allies, only the current and the cold. With seven silver shillings in her pocket, four copper pence from a smuggler, and a skinning knife on the table, she's holding a line that's already fraying at both ends.

Atmospheric, tense, and rich with the grit of nineteenth-century canal life, *The Girl at Lock Twenty-Three* is a survival thriller where the water never rests, the past refuses to stay submerged, and a girl who claims sixteen to boatmen and twelve to constables must decide how far she'll go to keep the gate closed—and the truth drowned.