The Latitude of Lies: Thorne & Linus Cartographic Mysteries, Book 1

In a town built on a fifteen-degree lie, the truth is the most dangerous thing you can measure.

Silas Thorne is a man of precise measurements and hard angles. As a licensed surveyor, he knows that while people lie, the land never does. When he’s hired to verify a high-stakes mining claim in the remote Sierra Nevada boomtown of Promise Creek, he expects a routine audit of quartz veins and property lines. Instead, he finds a town whose very geometry is an impossibility.

Accompanied by his partner Linus—a former professional gambler who reads human tells the way Silas reads terrain—Thorne discovers that Promise Creek’s main street curves for no reason, and the town's official maps have been rotated to hide a massive geographic fraud. But the stakes turn lethal when the local assayer is found murdered in a locked room, his throat stuffed with the very river-worn gold that proves the town's "floating vein" is a fiction.

As the duo digs beneath the surface, they uncover a sixty-yard tunnel cut through solid granite and a hidden valley overflowing with genuine gold—a valley that three separate government maps have wiped from existence.

For Silas, the mystery is deeply personal. Buried in the heart of the fraud is a twenty-year-old brass survey marker left by his long-lost father, Elias Thorne. It carries a cryptic bearing and a single, haunting command: CONTINUE. To solve the murder and reclaim his father’s legacy, Silas must rely on his theodolite and Linus’s mastery of the "human calculation" to outmaneuver a powerful adversary who will kill to keep the maps crooked.

Blending the grit of a classic Western with the intricate puzzles of a Golden Age mystery, The Latitude of Lies is a high-altitude thriller where every line drawn in ink is a matter of life and death.