The Crooked Beam

In the smog-choked industrial city of Grisham, magnate Ebenezer Charlton returns after twenty years to the slums of Raven Lane. Beneath the facade of civic progress, he discovers that the brutal eviction and murder of his boyhood friend’s family was sanctioned by a commissioner whose very appointment was a legal nullity. As Charlton unravels a conspiracy involving corrupt aldermen, a venal Court of Improvements, and a city whose entire property register rests on a crooked official’s rubber stamp, the fragile edifice of normal life begins to crumble. Told in the serpentine, socially incisive style of Charles Dickens, this is a tale of buried guilt, judicial farce, and the terrifying truth that every brick in a metropolis may rest on a murder.