Thirteen O'Clock

When the dead courthouse clock chimes thirteen times at midnight, ten-year-old detective Beatrix follows ciphers and red herrings to a hidden room behind the clock face and a secret the town buried long ago.

Everybody in Hollow Bend knew the old courthouse clock was dead. It had not ticked, tocked, or chimed in fifty years, ever since a storm cracked its glass face. The hands were frozen forever at 12:01, like the town was holding its breath.

Beatrix lived three doors down from the courthouse square, and she was not an ordinary ten-year-old. She kept a magnifying glass in her left pocket, a notebook in her right, and a list of unsolved neighborhood mysteries taped above her bed. So far she had solved nine of them, including the Case of the Disappearing Bird Feeder.

'A detective is just someone who refuses to stop asking why,' she told her cat, Sherlock, who refused to care. That night, lying awake, Beatrix had no idea the biggest case of her life was about to wake the whole town.