Problems of an Unusual Nature: Book 1

In the gaslit port city of Calgrave, Jericho Sand is a fixer. People hire him when normal channels won’t do, won’t be fast enough, or would require admitting things in writing. He has, over the years, gotten very good at sideways.

The case Ellis Broadstone brings to his door in the middle of a quiet evening sounds, at first, like the kind of case Sand has handled before: certain ledgers have been taken from a Heights office, and the client’s employer cannot find out before they’re recovered. By the second day it is something else.

Within a week the case touches an industrial magnate, a Council member with a strategic marriage, a Bright practitioner who can lift bindings out of a man at distance, a dock witch with grievances of her own — and a goat named Bramble, whose particular gift is walking through bindings other goats cannot.

It is not, on the morning Sand takes it, a goat job.

By the morning he closes it, it does not look like much else.

Bitter Ledger Hearts is the first novel in Problems of an Unusual Nature, an ongoing series of comic action-fantasy mysteries. For readers of Glen Cook’s Garrett P.I. and Terry Pratchett’s Watch.