The Black Road of Ghent

Ghent, 1919: the war is over but the killing has not stopped — in the countryside around Ghent and Bruges farms are raided, homes broken into, and people shot for resisting, and at each scene the police find the same mark, a scrap of black cloth cut into a triangle; when the Belgian Detective and his loyal companion arrive at the urgent request of an examining magistrate, they learn the gang's suspected leader has just escaped from custody with one guard dead, and then a body is found by the canal near Damme with papers identifying it as the very man who escaped the night before; as the detective moves through a wounded city of wet cobblestones, dark canals, and frightened witnesses, he follows brass buttons from coats that belong to no regiment, flour dust in a dead man's lining, a widow who kept wartime accounts she was never meant to survive, and a trusted police inspector whose loyalty hides something far worse than negligence; inspired by the real Van Hoe–Verstuyft Gang of East Flanders (1919–1924) while remaining entirely fictional, The Black Road of Ghent is an original Golden Age–style mystery about postwar chaos, wartime profiteering, and the discovery that the most dangerous man in a broken country is not the bandit in the field but the official who holds the keys.