The Purser

San Francisco, 1943. On the graving docks of a wartime Navy yard, four thousand people work through the night — and a ship's purser has vanished with one page of a cargo manifest.

The night shift says a white man walks the dock wall at three in the morning, on the nights a certain ship is in. They call him a ghost, because a ghost is the only report a Navy lieutenant will file without hanging somebody for it. Dixon Hill reads their ghost story as what it is: the only honest logbook on the yard, kept by people no one would let keep one.

A planted thumbprint. A treasurer whose books are kept badly on purpose. A truth that has no category anyone is permitted to write down.

Book 4 of seven. A city that keeps its own books.