The Name Under The Paint

Some boats carry cargo. This one carries a secret.

It's 1975, and Elizabeth and Edward Andersen - fifteen, twins, and the only detectives Hadley Junior High has ever needed - are expecting two long, boring weeks aboard a chartered sailboat with their parents.

Then they meet the "Halcyon".

Her captain is kind, quiet, and lying about something. Her rule is simple: "the aft door stays shut." And under the gold paint on her transom, if the light hits just right, there's another name - a name somebody worked very hard to cover up.

The twins can't leave a locked door alone. They never could. But this time the clues lead somewhere bigger than a missing stapler: a coded chart, a warning hidden in a bench seam, an old man on an "uninhabited" island with a message for the captain - and a polite stranger in city shoes who keeps turning up wherever the family sails.

Thirty years ago, a wartime smuggling ring shut down overnight, clean as a light switch, and something it lost was never found. The men who lost it are still looking. They're patient. They're official-looking.

And they're letting two fifteen-year-olds lead them straight to it.

A dead lighthouse. A reef called the Devil's Comb. One final delivery, thirty years overdue - and a family that turns out to be far more than wallpaper.

For readers 10-17, fans of "The Westing Game" and "Greenglass House", and anyone who ever wanted to know what's behind the one door they're not allowed to open.

Book One of the Andersen Twins Mysteries.