Missing: One Hour

One Saturday morning, the whole town of Maple Hollow wakes up to find that exactly one hour is gone. Every clock and every memory skips from 8 to 9 a.m. Eleven-year-old detective Posy Quill follows the clues nobody else noticed to discover what really happened during the lost hour.

Posy Quill kept a notebook in her left sneaker, a magnifying glass in her right, and a rule above her bed that said: A clue is just a question wearing a disguise. She was eleven, and she was, in her own opinion, the best detective in the town of Maple Hollow. So far her cases had been small ones, like the Mystery of the Vanishing Lunch Pudding, which turned out to be her dog, Inspector.

That Saturday morning, Posy woke up sure that something was wrong before she even knew what it was. Her clock said 9:01. But the last thing she remembered was lying in bed at 7:58, listening to the milk truck. She had a strange dizzy feeling, like skipping a step on the stairs in the dark.

'Inspector,' she whispered to her dog, 'do you ever feel like a page got torn out of the morning?' Inspector wagged his tail and offered her a sock. That was not helpful, but it was loyal.

She went downstairs, and that was when she heard her mother on the phone, sounding more confused than Posy had ever heard her. The whole town, it seemed, had the same hole in the same morning.