● Middle school mystery & supernatural suspense
Every town has a secret. Rattlecross has hundreds.
Rattlecross looks like any small American town. Low houses and wet roads. A railroad line. The old brick station that became the public library. A school with yellow buses waiting in the loop.
But Rattlecross has a habit of leaving official things unfinished: a bus route the district skipped, streets the council vacated, a crossing it closed instead of signaling. In Rattlecross, the things a town forgets to finish can keep the power to act.
Each book follows a different young resident who notices that something is wrong before anyone else will believe it. These aren't monster-fighting or ghost-hunting stories. They are mysteries about paying attention, keeping your friends close, and finding the courage to ask the question everyone else is avoiding.
● In order
Book One
Her stop is gone. The bus keeps going.
Maren Vale's school bus has missed her stop, the brakes don't work, and the route card lists streets that shouldn't exist. Her little brother will be walking home alone at five thirty.
Book Two
An empty desk. A student marked present.
Cal Stoll has perfect attendance, so he notices when his teacher marks an empty desk present. Then Cal is marked absent, while he's standing right there.
Book Three
One side is April. The other side is October.
Lena Brekke is moving away in seven weeks. Then she finds a gate where no gate has ever been, and a trail of falling autumn leaves on the other side.
Book Four
The map says forty-seven. The ground says forty-six.
The old cemetery map shows forty-seven graves. Nora Stenberg counts only forty-six. The next morning, a nameless white marble marker stands in the fresh snow, and nobody has crossed it.
Book Five
Every object has a receipt. None of them list a price.
Somewhere in Rattlecross, a storefront appears at midnight, full of things the town has lost and the promises nobody kept.
Book Six · Working title
The route was erased. The stop is still there.
An abandoned bus stop appears on a route that was officially erased decades earlier. When children discover that passengers have been disappearing from the town's records, they must uncover the truth behind a stop nobody remembers creating.
Book Seven · Working title
Every unfinished file leads to this one.
As strange incidents across Rattlecross begin connecting, a final discovery reveals that the town's disappearing streets, altered records, mysterious graves, and unfinished promises are part of a much larger mystery. The children must confront the truth behind Rattlecross's history before the town's unfinished business threatens everything they know.
The series is planned in seven books. Books Six and Seven are still in the planning stage, so their titles and storylines are provisional.
