Casey Thorn

Shanghai, 1937. The city is divided but still functioning - a fragile anomaly of treaty law and routine holding back the advance of war. In the French Concession, Alexei Volkov makes a living moving things that cannot be moved openly: artifacts, money, documents, histories. When he is hired to extract a prestigious Chinese antiquities collection from Nanshi before the Japanese army arrives, the job appears difficult but straightforward.
It is neither. A prior sale to a Japanese collector, a divided household, and a rapidly collapsing timeline turn the operation into a negotiation between power, ownership, and survival. As the city reorganizes around him, Alexei must broker a solution that satisfies everyone - and no one - while ensuring the collection escapes before it is lost entirely. The Settlement Fence is a precise, atmospheric historical novel about systems under pressure, the quiet mechanics of survival, and the people who operate in the narrow spaces between law and reality.
It is a story of transactions that become moral decisions, and of what remains when everything else is in motion.