March 4, 2022

Gideon Green in Black and White

Truly Devious meets Turtles All the Way Down in critically acclaimed author Katie Henry’s YA contemporary comedic mystery, a hilarious send-up of the hardboiled detective genre that spotlights family, friendship and love.

Gideon’s short-lived run as a locally famous boy detective ended when middle school started, and everyone else—including his best friend, Lily—moved on while Gideon kept holding on to his trench coat, fedora and his treasured film noir collection. Now he’s sixteen and officially retired. That is, until Lily shows up suddenly at Gideon’s door, needing his help.

He might be mad at her for cutting him off with no explanation, but Gideon can’t turn down a case. As a cover, Gideon joins Lily on the school paper. Surprisingly, he finds himself warming up to the welcoming, close-knit staff . . . especially Tess, the cute, witty editor-in-

chief.

But as the case gets bigger than Gideon or Lily could have anticipated, Gideon must balance his black-and-white quest for the truth with the full colors of real life—or risk a permanent fade to black.

October 7, 2021

The Attraction: House of Illusion

From the author of Off Trail comes a hilarious mystery about what happens when a chilling trip leads to a lost fortune.

Nate and Lily knew their mother was different. All it took was a hunch or a bad feeling and the family would be uprooted and moving to a different apartment or even a different town. But when the two are torn out of their life in the ritzy North Bay for the summer and dropped in "the Mississippi of California" on the Sacramento River Delta, Nate Caldwell and his sister Lily see it as one more move in a series of lurching disruptions driven by their mother's suspicion that something or someone is after them.

When they settle into life around their uncle's House of Illusion roadside attraction, Nate meets Mia—who makes all the girls he knew in the North Bay seem shallow and dull—and begins to connect with local teens who couldn't be more different than the privileged classmates he left behind. 

It's not until they learn that the story behind the attraction is more than just a tale for the tourists, that Nate begins to figure out what drove his mother's suspicious nature.

Here’s a novel with all the elements of a thriller, from hulking, slow-witted antagonists who believe in conspiracy theories, to an abduction, car chases and a teen dragnet op. There’s also a would-be psychic, a legend of lost treasure and a carnival-style house of mirrors-plus.

August 23, 2021

Up the Creek

Has Chris Dearing finally broken his family’s run of bad luck? Find out in this hilarious, high-stakes companion to Mine! Chris Dearing is positive his family’s long streak of bad luck is finally over. Sure, he’s thought that before, but this time is different. He’s reclaimed his grandfather’s land in the Yukon — the land his granddad swore was full of gold. Now Chris just has to wait for his father to get out of jail so they can start mining their family fortune.

But things get complicated quickly. His dad’s new “business partners” seem more like crooks. Child Protective Services is getting in the way. And then Chris learns that his grandfather may not have been 100 percent truthful about where his gold actually came from. With his best friend by his side and an angry guard goose hot on his tail, can Chris hatch a plan to break the Dearing curse once and for all?

August 21, 2021

Linked

Link, Michael and Dana live in a quiet town. But it's woken up very quickly when someone sneaks into school and vandalizes it with a swastika. Nobody can believe it. How could such a symbol of hate end up in the middle of their school? Who would do such a thing? Because Michael was the first person to see it, he's the first suspect. Because Link is one of the most popular guys in school, everyone's looking to him to figure it out. And because Dana's the only Jewish girl in the whole town, everyone's treating her more like an outsider than ever. The mystery deepens as more swastikas begin to appear. Some students decide to fight back and start a project to bring people together instead of dividing them further. The closer Link, Michael and Dana get to the truth, the more there is to face – not just the crimes of the present, but the crimes of the past. With Linked, Gordon Korman, the author of the acclaimed novel Restart, poses a mystery for all readers where the who did it? isn't nearly as important as the why?

August 20, 2021

Notorious

Keenan has lived all over the world but nowhere quite as strange as Centerlight Island, which is split between the United States and Canada. The only thing weirder than Centerlight itself is his neighbor Zarabeth, aka ZeeBee.

ZeeBee is obsessed with the island’s history as a Prohibition-era smuggling route. She’s also convinced that her beloved dog, Barney, was murdered—something Keenan finds pretty hard to believe.

Just about everyone on Centerlight is a suspect, because everyone hated Barney, a huge dog—part mastiff, part rottweiler—notorious for terrorizing the community. Accompanied by a mild-mannered new dog who is practically Barney’s opposite, ZeeBee enlists Keenan’s help to solve the mystery.

As Keenan and ZeeBee start to unravel the clues, they uncover a shocking conspiracy that dates back to Centerlight’s gangster past. The good news is that Keenan may have found the best friend he’s ever had. The bad news is that the stakes are sky-high. And now someone is after them. . .