UniKin

Synopsis

Clay is a Jamaican private detective with a past life in law, keeping a low profile in a cluttered office above Ridley Road Market. Finch is a young Romanian bicycle courier who knows London’s back routes better than its main roads. When Finch delivers an anonymous parcel to Clay and an iron key falls out with Tangent Jones’ name on it, both men are pulled into a pattern they didn’t choose.

Tangent is missing. She is one of the Seven Sisters, a small, mostly invisible network of women who tend the city’s luck and craft: the near-misses, the hinge-points, the quiet adjustments that stop London tearing itself apart. Her disappearance leaves a gap in the system, and that gap is being exploited by the Order – a bureaucratic power that runs the city through ownership, paperwork, and institutional coercion.

As Clay follows Tangent’s trail through archives, housing offices and misaligned floor plans, the Order moves against him. He is sectioned and drugged in Homerton Hospital, removed from the board. Finch, who only meant to drop a parcel and get back on his bike, finds himself stepping into Clay’s role. Guided by the remaining Sisters – including a night-bus driver whose route crosses the city’s deeper lines – he is given three tasks: infiltrate a records building in Islington, navigate impossible geometry in an estate, and find a room under King’s Cross that should not exist.

Piece by piece, Clay and Finch uncover the truth: somewhere beneath Gillett Square, the unicorn from the British coat of arms is not just a symbol but a mechanism. Chained in place, it anchors the whole structure of ownership that London rests on. Tangent has reached it and become trapped in the process, bound up with the city’s luck itself. To free her, Clay must hold off the Order with what remains of his legal skill while Finch descends into the chamber below and faces a choice between collapse, compliance, or a riskier third way.

About the book

UniKin is a compact, character-led urban fantasy about power, care, and the people who keep a city running in the gaps between institutions. It stays close to real streets and real systems – housing, hospitals, transport, records offices – while treating London’s heraldry and civic symbols as literal, dangerous machinery.