The Crimson Tide
London, 1666.
The city is dry, crowded, wooden, and waiting for the wrong spark.
In a chamber above the Thames, Lord Edmund Harrington and Lord William Sumner prepare a lie before the fire has even begun. A forged Dutch letter. Paid witnesses. A convenient baker's shop on Pudding Lane. A rumor sharp enough to turn panic into policy. If London burns, the disaster can be made useful. If the people are afraid enough, hungry enough, and angry enough, even a king can be forced toward the hand that claims to offer order.
Isabella Wren knows nothing of that design when the flames take Thomas Farriner's bakery and destroy the life she has spent years building one loaf at a time. Running through smoke, ash, collapsing streets, and terrified crowds, she survives with little more than a burned hand, a knife, and the stubborn refusal to disappear with the rest of the forgotten.
Jamie Blackwood has seen war, powder smoke, and the way powerful men spend common lives in the name of causes. He wants no part of another one. But when he finds Izzy in the burning city and begins to see the shape of human design inside catastrophe, he understands that fire is only the first danger.
The second is the story men will tell about it.
Together, Izzy and Jamie follow scraps of evidence from refugee camps to wharves, from the Tower to Whitehall, from murdered witnesses to royal chambers, and from the first blaze to the harder struggle that follows: hunger, relief, rebuilding, and the question of who gets to own a ruined city's future.
The Crimson Tide is a sweeping historical thriller about the Great Fire of London, conspiracy, public witness, class, bread, power, and the ordinary people forced to fight not only the flames, but the men waiting to profit from the ashes.
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