The Covenant of Crooked Lane

Some secrets bury themselves. Others wait to be found. Boston, October 2025. The city is in its 250th anniversary year, the official story of the American founding being polished for the occasion. When a restoration crew opens a wall cavity in the Old North Church and finds a sealed tin box containing three encrypted documents from 1741, documents specialist Dr. Nora Callahan is called to the scene. She has barely begun when there is also a body in the garden. Detective Ray Okafor has worked Boston Homicide for sixteen years. He thought he understood what the case was until the case found him. For years, his father had been saying a name at the kitchen table in the voice of a man greeting someone he had missed, and Ray had filed it as the disease. Now, he is no longer sure. The papers belonged to a secret order founded in 1741 by seven people the city had written out of its official history. What they built, and why someone has tried to prevent it from being found for nearly three hundred years, draws Nora and Ray into a Boston that exists beneath the Boston on every map and every tourist trail. The Covenant of Crooked Lane is a historical thriller about what gets kept and what gets lost, and about the documents that sometimes survive to complicate the official version, waiting with the patience of things that do not have the option of impatience.

Pages: 433, Paperback, Press 1741