The Night Watch Hamster of Lincoln Elementary

About this book:

By day, Barnaby is the golden-furred classroom pet in Room 202, content to nibble pellets and observe the chaos of third grade. By night, he’s Lincoln Elementary’s most dedicated recovery specialist—a one-hamster lost-and-found department with a nose for gel-ink trails, a talent for crawling through expansion joints, and zero tolerance for the careless mysteries that plague the hallway after dark. When a fourth-grader’s prized ten-color Japanese click-pen vanishes, Barnaby trades his exercise wheel for a stakeout, enlisting a nervous field mouse named Pip and improvising tools from a ladybug barrette to retrieve the contraband before the floor buffer makes its rounds.

What follows is a nocturnal caper through a school that never truly sleeps: glitter-pen heists in the art room, a phantom squeak haunting the gym, a retainer lost in the cafeteria, and a locked trophy case guarding secrets older than the building itself. Each chapter unfolds a new case file in Barnaby’s ledger, blending the grit of a hardboiled detective novel with the wonder of a child’s imagination—where custodians patrol like sentries, vending machines hum like reactors, and every dropped eraser shaving is a clue waiting to be followed.

Witty, warm, and whispered from three inches off the linoleum, *The Night Watch Hamster of Lincoln Elementary* invites readers of all ages to see the familiar world anew. It’s a love letter to the things we lose, the quiet heroes who find them, and the magic that happens when the final bell rings and the real work begins.