When Hell Freezes Over – Kobo eBook

Lima, 1871. The fog never lifts, and the railway is the pride of a nation.

Mateo Quiroga is a clerk with a beautiful hand. Six days a week he copies names into the company’s great black ledgers: the men building the highest railway in the world, each with a number and a wage. He never sees their faces. He has never asked a question in his life.

Then, alone one night in the record room beneath the office, he finds a thin grey book that nobody reads. Its title is four words long: Men who did not return.

One of the names in it is Ramn Castillo, No. 097. He died in January. Three days ago, Mateo wrote that same name in his own ledger, with wages beside it.

One dead man being paid could be a mistake. Three is a habit. Nine is a system.

Mateo is not a brave man, but he cannot stop. His search takes him through forged statements in a warm upstairs office, to a Chinese translator in Callao who has secretly kept his own record for years, and up to Chicla, twelve thousand feet high, where he finally sees what the ledgers have been hiding. At every step he meets Don Agustn Vallejo: quiet, charming, and the most dangerous man in Lima. Don Agustn knows exactly what Mateo has found, and he has one offer left to make.

Mateo has a single question for him. When will the dead men’s names be written down correctly?

Don Agustn laughs. “When hell freezes over.”

Set against the real building of Peru’s Central Railway, When Hell Freezes Over is a slow-burning historical thriller about memory, money, and what one honest clerk can do with nothing but a pen. Its clear, simple English, which grows richer as the story goes on, makes it ideal for English learners and for any reader who enjoys a quiet story with a hidden fuse.