The Lost Engine – Paperback

A locomotive headlight comes out of the ground beneath Penrose’s north district. The Heritage Preservation Board calls it industrial debris and files it.

Bookseller Ari Penrose disagrees.

Then a sinkhole opens overnight in the municipal lot, wide enough to swallow a park bench – and Jason Bloom, standing at its edge, says the thing nobody wants to hear: whatever is down there has been holding the street up.

Beneath Penrose sits Engine No. 3, sealed since 1865, and a passenger car nobody ever accounted for. The founding families called it containment. What they meant was civic language wrapped around an industrial disaster and the people who died in it.

Construction starts in eleven weeks.

Ari isn’t just racing the truth. He’s racing the backhoes.