Fiction from the press
A missing boy on Mackinac Island. A message carried past a military roadblock. A damaged watch opening onto another Modesto.
Begin with the first three novels in each series. Our first books are forthcoming.
Children’s books and illustrated adventures →Historical mysteries
From 1958 into the late 1960s, Lula Hayes works the Michigan that postcards leave out: iron ranges, auto plants, and resort towns after the season ends. A missing person or an unexplained death brings her to people who have learned to keep their troubles to themselves. Lula keeps asking.
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Forthcoming
October 1958. Lula Hayes arrives on Mackinac Island to find sixteen-year-old Henry Ashworth, missing from the Grand Hotel. The constable believes he ran away. His grandfather is not convinced, and has asked Lula to investigate quietly before the island closes for winter.
Forthcoming
When mine engineer Arne Maki disappears, his sister asks Lula Hayes to find him. In Michigan’s iron country, company records and the people who keep them tell different stories. With Bob Nyland’s help, she follows the trail toward an abandoned mine and a town divided by a steel strike.
Forthcoming
A schoolgirl brings Lula a cipher linked to Cedar Point. Lula follows it through the park’s machinery and a bundle of old letters. The girl knows the adults are hiding something. Lula must learn who hid the letters, why the others helped, and which secret still threatens the child.
Historical fiction
Couriers, dockworkers, nurses, and fighters carry these novels across the Americas and the Pacific, through occupations, uprisings, and covert wars. Their struggles give rise to La Común, a network built on people willing to help one another across borders.
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Forthcoming
Nicaragua, 1927. Rosa learns that military commanders are using relief convoys to direct violence into the countryside. She brings frightened couriers and unreliable radio operators together before the next column moves. Every delay leaves another village alone.
Forthcoming
Wartime Hawaiʻi. Military officials use clearance files to control work at the docks and punish families at home. Dockworkers and Native Hawaiian organizers try to protect their families while deciding how much to trust the outsiders offering help.
Forthcoming
Puerto Rico, 1950. Police turn speeches and employment cards into evidence. Printers and drivers carry people and testimony into the mountains while families argue over who should leave, who should stay, and whether the next delivery will save anyone or expose them.
Young adult speculative mystery
In Modesto and the versions of it that might have been, young watchmakers and their friends discover what happens when adults turn care into control. A damaged watch keeps opening doors, and every return home asks them to change something there.
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Forthcoming
A twelve-year-old apprentice watchmaker repairs a damaged watch and opens a path into other versions of Modesto. In each city, adults sort children into those worth helping and those they can ignore. Then the friends hear adults at their own school making the same argument.
Forthcoming
The friends stopped adults in one Modesto from ranking children and would like to enjoy being right. Instead, they have to build something better. When a city program offers food and meeting space, the adults running it start deciding which children deserve to come inside.
Forthcoming
A before-school program tells families that it can predict which students will succeed. The friends use the watch to visit cities where adults control every hour of a child’s day. They return tired, divided, and unwilling to let their own school make the same bargain.
Publication news
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