Old Broadbrim Seeking the Man in Black

A detective who trusts nothing. A boy with too many secrets. A man in black who kills to keep them.

Josiah Broadbrim has seen every con the city has to offer—but something about the ruddy-faced boy with the burned arm and the five-dollar story doesn't sit right. The Quaker detective follows his instincts into the worst streets of the East Side, where crime isn't just practiced. It's taught.

What he finds there shakes even his iron composure.

The boy is no innocent farm hand—he's a product of Miser Ben's underground school of thieves, shaped into a living weapon of fraud and sentiment. But beneath the performance, something human still flickers. Something that makes him dangerous to the wrong people.

When a shot rings out from a tenement window and the boy crumples to the pavement, Broadbrim knows the game has changed. This is no random street violence. Someone powerful wants the boy silenced—permanently.

And the man who passes Broadbrim on the stairs, cool-eyed and sharp-toothed, dressed head to toe in black, vanishes into the city like smoke.

Now Broadbrim is hunting a shadow. A man with a fortune to protect, a nephew to destroy, and no conscience to slow him down.

If Broadbrim loses this trail, a young man dies—and a criminal empire built on stolen innocence walks free forever.

Can the Quaker detective find the Man in Black before the next shot doesn't miss?