The Unclosed

Caldmouth is a port city the fog never quite lets go of. Every so often a street, a ship, or a person simply slips — and when the world gives them back, they're marked. Elias Marrow just wanted eleven crowns for a night's inventory work. Instead he found a sealed hold full of something the manifest never mentioned, and came out the other side owing a debt he never agreed to, carrying a name — Witness — that the Bureau of Unclosed Cases now owns. Every rank of power comes with a price paid in memory, years, or the people you love. Every case that doesn't get solved gets marked closed — a euphemism, if you're marked yourself, for something considerably worse. And somewhere in the Bureau's own archive is a file on his father, dead nine years, still open. The Unclosed is a gaslamp mystery serial about an amoral bureaucracy, a fog that eats people, and one broke, clever dockworker who intends to reopen exactly the one case they never wanted looked at again.