Middlesbrough in the 1860s–1880s was the most extraordinary industrial town in the world. Founded in 1830, it grew from a handful of houses to a booming city of steel and iron within a single generation. It was called 'Ironopolis' by Gladstone himself. This is the emotional and physical origin of everything in The Ironopolis Files.

The Iron Works: The blast furnaces, the smell of hot metal, the orange glow visible for miles — this sensory world appears in flashbacks, letters, and objects carried to New York.

The Tees River: Ships carried Middlesbrough steel across the world. The docks are where secrets and cargo moved together.

The Working Community: Tight-knit, proud, class-conscious but deeply loyal. The ancestors of our characters carry this culture to America.

The Steel Patent Wars: Real industrial espionage happened in Middlesbrough. Competitor firms stole each other's formulas. This is the seed of the series conspiracy.

The Transporter Bridge (completed 1911): A symbol of Middlesbrough's engineering ambition — referenced as 'under construction' in later books.

New York, 1890. Alice Thorne attends the Astor Winter Ball dressed as a reindeer. This is the least of her problems.

When a mysterious naval commander whispers that her husband has just sold naval secrets to the Prussians, Alice finds herself concealing a stolen ledger in her corset, a Countess in blood-red silk, and considerably more enemies than the evening's invitation suggested.

She has spent three years being the most overlooked woman in every room. She is about to find out she was always the most dangerous one.

The Antler Incident

is the first book in The Ironopolis Files:

A sharp, propulsive historical mystery for readers who like their heroines armed with intelligence, their conspiracies properly threaded, and

their antlers silver-tipped.

Some women are placed on the board

without being told the rules.

Alice intends to rewrite them.

Blackwell's Island Workhouse, 1891. Marithea Bell has been here for fourteen months. She has also, in that time, acquired a Persian rug, a mahogany desk, a bone china tea service, and the most comprehensive intelligence network on the East River.

The authorities believe they have contained her. They have simply relocated her.

When a woman named Brigid Crane arrives on a Thursday — not an intake day — and is found dead in the laundry building four months later, Marithea begins pulling a thread that runs from a Prussian sleeper agent in Manhattan society all the way back to a patent theft in 1868 and the Middlesbrough ironworks that built an empire on someone else's invention.

She cannot leave her cell. She has a laundress, a priest, a nineteen-year-old dock worker, and a journalist who finds things she wasn't supposed to find. She has Crowe, who has been whittling the same shape for the length of a murder investigation and has never once failed to deliver.

And she has, piece by piece, assembled the thing they thought a cell would prevent her from assembling.

The Gilded Cage is the second book in The Ironopolis Files — for readers who like their intelligence operations run from a well appointed cell, their conspiracies twenty years deep, and their protagonists entirely, magnificently uncontainable.

They put her somewhere she could not act.

She had already been acting for months.