Historical fiction
The Hammer and the Shield
Rome can win any battle fought on land. The sea belongs to Carthage.
Manius Fabricius is the wrong kind of Roman — a senator's son who reads hulls the way other men read glory. When his father and brother drown in the strait at Scylla, the family calls it valor. Manius knows it was error, and the knowing changes him. He answers with an invention: an iron-beaked bridge that nails enemy ships to Roman decks and turns the sea into a battlefield Rome cannot lose.
The bridge wins Rome the water. The column in the Forum names the consul. Nowhere in the stone is the man who drew the ships — and the device that conquered the sea carries a flaw only its maker can see, written in the weight it carries too high.
His wife keeps a locked chest of drawings. Rome must never learn what it holds.
Literary historical fiction of the First Punic War and the maker Rome forgot.
The Hammer and the Shield is the First Punic War novel of the shield cycle — the story of the Roman engineer behind the corvus, the boarding bridge that won Rome the sea and left its maker out of the record. The manuscript and cover are finished; a release date will be announced to the notebook list.