Tide of Thieves

"Drawing a bucket of water and fell overboard."

Hull, 1882. A fifteen-year-old apprentice is lost from a fishing smack on the Dogger Bank. The skipper reports it as an accident, and a clerk at the Town Hall writes down the same words he's used for forty other boys that winter. Back on Great Union Street, a mother copies those words onto a scrap of paper and tells her three-year-old son never to forget them.

Joss Wray never does.

He grows up on the Garrison Side, where the Wrays have worked the river for generations, sometimes inside the law and often outside it. In the fog on the Humber, cargo goes missing between ship and warehouse: tobacco, brandy, Riga flax, Baltic gold. Joss learns the trade from his father and his uncle, and he turns out to be better at it than either of them. He's patient and clever, and he is still waiting for the man who threw his brother into the sea.

Then the Londoners arrive. They are young, violent and organised, and each one wears a small silver hatchet on his lapel. Behind them is a Hoxton gang boss who wants all of Hull, from the river and the docks to the bench. He has also taken a very personal interest in the Wray family.

Tide of Thieves runs from the dock strike of 1893 to the Zeppelin raids of 1915. It's an epic of revenge, family and power, set among the river pirates, crimps, smugglers and street gangs of a great northern port. The book draws on real history, including the drowned apprentice boys, the Dogger Bank incident and the notorious Silver Hatchet Gang. It's for readers of Peaky Blinders, SS-GB and Catherine Cookson's darker side.

The river gives nothing back. Joss Wray means to take it anyway.