The Halbrook Business

San Francisco, 1938. Somebody is selling the hours.

On the Embarcadero, a longshoremen's hiring hall runs on a chalkboard and a book — and a clerk with a pencil holds more power than any boss, because whoever writes the hours down owns them. When an illiterate Portuguese dockworker notices the arithmetic doesn't add, only Dixon Hill will listen. Everyone who can read just laughs.

Behind it stands Cyrus Halbrook, who reads Gibbon at the Palace and trades in one commodity: things made available. A frightened clerk, a forged deposition, a brass check on a bootlace — and a question the whole waterfront is afraid to ask aloud.

Book 2 of seven. A city that keeps its own books; a detective who writes everything down and uses none of it.