Death By Any Other Name

San Francisco, 1946. A lawyer climbs Dixon Hill's stairs with fifties folded once and a single instruction: find a reader.

A man is reading the year 1906 in the one basement in the city where 1906 can still be read — the only unrazored file, the only surviving relief cards — and a client who owns half the waterfront wants his name. Hill finds every trace the man leaves: a library slip, a hiring chit stamped in red, a room with the mirror taken down. He never sees his face. Because the man has seen him first, every morning, from across the street.

The case Dixon Hill lost — and the thing he kept.

Book 6 of seven. A city that keeps its own books.