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The Suits of Iron & Dust: Book 2 of the Arcana Syndicate
Paperback
Series: The Arcana Syndicate, Book 2
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Aug 20 2026
Pages: 128
Weight: 0.36
Height: 0.32 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
WHEN THE DIGITAL WORLD WENT DARK, THE OLD IRON TOOK OVER.
London, 2048. Three months after the Great Reset permanently severed the global optical mesh, the British Isles have collapsed into air-gapped, feudal Enclaves. The digital clearing networks are dead, algorithms no longer dictate human life, and eight million survivors are trapped in a city dying of thirst, cold, and silence.
Civilisation rests on the shoulders of the Civilian Logistics Board at Guildhall, and the few men and women who still know how to audit the physical world.
Senior Detective Logan Swire of the Met's Special Audit Division is a relic of a bygone age. Suffering from developmental prosopagnosia (face blindness), Swire cannot recognize human faces. Instead, he audits identity through kinetic architecture: gait, weight distribution, and acoustic signatures. Armed with a Webley .455 revolver, a leather ledger, and a body scarred from the pre-Reset wars, he is the iron enforcer holding London's fragile peace together.
Beside him is Denise Denny Hughes, a brilliant former neural-optical specialist from Belfast. Stripped of the digital HUDs that once overclocked her visual cortex, Denny navigates severe kinetic risk-aphasia using a Victorian brass tally counter, a tactile governor (click-clack) that regulates her hyper-acute spatial mind.
When a locked rail van on the Harwich spur arrives carrying three murdered auditors and a severed corporate stamping die, Swire and Denny uncover a terrifying reality: the corporate enclaves have aligned. To the east, the maritime oil cartels of the Suit of Pentacles hold the fuel and grain. To the west, the private military network of the Suit of Swords enforces an unyielding blockade with autonomous drone swarms.
To break the blockade and secure grain for a starving London, Swire and Denny must launch a desperate raid on Node 07 - The Chariot, a massive, heavily guarded industrial forge in Stratford where carbon-fibre strike droids are pressed.
Full of rich world building, gritty procedural forensics, and disability-inclusive high-stakes action, The Suits of Iron & Dust is a gripping dark wave cyberpunk thriller about legacy systems, mechanical leverage, and the unyielding human spirit in a post-digital world.
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