The Clocktower Summer of Milo

About this book:

Sixteen-year-old Milo arrives in Oakhaven for a summer of boredom, banished to his taciturn grandfather's porch while his parents untangle their marriage back home. But the town's frozen clocktower—a massive Seth Thomas movement seized by forty years of rust, bat guano, and indifference—catches his imagination. What begins as curiosity becomes obsession: Milo steals the only key, climbs the rotting ladders, and dares to wake a machine the town has long since written off as scenery.

Each gear he cleans, each envelope he finds tucked in the mechanism, pulls him deeper into Oakhaven's buried history—and his own family's place in it. His grandfather Silas watches with quiet eyes that miss nothing. Mrs. Gable's rye bread waits on the counter. And somewhere in the belfry, a pendulum that hasn't swung since 1982 is learning to breathe again.

*The Clocktower Summer of Milo* is a love letter to broken things and the hands that fix them: a coming-of-age mystery wound tight as a mainspring, where every chapter ticks toward a secret that could shatter the silence of a town—and a family—that forgot how to keep time.