The Setting
Crescent City, 1947
A rain-soaked port metropolis built on Prohibition money, blackmail, and the kind of civic corruption that becomes tradition after a generation. Five districts. One city. No clean hands.
The Five Districts
The Heights
Old money. Older secrets.Whitmore Manor sits at the top of Crescent Hill, visible from every district. The founding families live behind iron gates and conduct their business in rooms that don't appear on any floor plan. The Heights funds the city. The Heights owns the judges.
Primary residence of the Gilded Circle's upper tier.
Silk Row
The city's one honest lie.Jazz every night at the Blue Moon Lounge. Gambling, vice, and music played loud enough to cover conversations that can't be overheard. Silk Row doesn't pretend to be clean. That makes it the most trustworthy district in Crescent City.
Home to Diamond Jack Marconi's information network.
The Iron District
The law, and the law's masters.Police headquarters. The courthouse. The foundries running three shifts. The working class lives here and believes someone is watching out for them. Captain Doyle runs the precinct. He answers to other people.
CCPD headquarters. Where Vera once had a badge.
The Drowned Quarter
Where the city forgets to look.The lowest point in Crescent City, literally and otherwise. Flood-prone, underfunded, spiritually alive. Mrs. Chen reads tea at the corner house. Father Dominic keeps secrets under his vestments. Vera Saint-Claire keeps her office on Whisper and Ninth.
Vera's neighborhood. Spiritualist quarter. Her base of operations.
Ash End
Everything comes through here.The docks. The warehouses. The ships with unmarked manifests. Ash End is where the Ledger's leverage gets enforced — quietly, in the rain, with no witnesses and no timeline to contradict. Disappearances here are statistical.
The Gilded Circle's enforcement ground.
The Antagonist
The Gilded Circle
Founded 1923 during Prohibition. Fourteen members — seven public, seven shadow. Industrialists, judges, police brass, entertainers, and one spiritualist who understood that ritual creates loyalty.
Their instrument is The Ledger: a comprehensive record of every secret worth owning in Crescent City. Infidelities. Crimes. Financial ruin held in reserve. The Ledger isn't evidence — it's leverage. A city-wide insurance policy paid in silence.
By 1947, the founding members are dying. Someone is accelerating the process. Whether that someone wants justice, power, or simply to watch what the Circle built finally burn — Vera doesn't know yet.
The Protagonist
Vera Saint-Claire
Age 32. Private investigator. Former CCPD Detective Second Grade. Office: Whisper & Ninth, Drowned Quarter. Tarot card: The Hanged Man (XII).
Vera left the force in 1946 after exposing Captain Marcus Webb — her mentor and the man who poisoned her mother sixteen years earlier on orders from Police Chief Webb Sr. The testimony cost her everything except the truth. She considers that a reasonable trade.
She uses her grandmother's Rider-Waite deck not for divination but for pattern recognition. The cards are a symbolic shorthand for human psychology — archetypes mapped onto suspects, motives, contradictions. They don't tell her what happened. They show her what she's been refusing to see.
"Everyone lies. The trick is figuring out what they're lying about and why."
V. Saint-Claire — XII, The Hanged Man
Enter the investigation
Volume 0 is free. Meet Vera. Walk the Drowned Quarter. Learn what the Hanged Man sees.
Play Free — Volume 0