The Bus Driver's Lost Button
A Tiny Mystery on Route 7

About this book:

On Route 7, the schedule is sacred, the coffee is strong, and the rules are absolute—until the second brass button on Arthur Barnaby's thirty-two-year-old uniform coat works itself loose and vanishes into the guts of Engine No. 402. For a driver who measures his life in perfect stops and polished trolley-car buttons, a missing fastener isn't a wardrobe malfunction; it's a crack in the foundation of civic order. What follows is the most charming investigation in Oakhaven's history: a mile-by-mile, stop-by-stop hunt for a piece of brass no larger than a thumbnail, conducted from the driver's seat of a moving city bus.

Between the baker who guards his floury seats like a dragon, the knitting grandmother whose red yarn is absolutely not a clue, the student with a magnifying glass and a theory for everything, and a dog named Barnaby (no relation) asleep under Seat Nine, Arthur's routine route becomes a rolling crime scene. Every pothole, every sudden brake, every passenger's innocent question becomes a lead. The suspects are the regulars he's known for decades; the evidence is measured in threads, crumbs, and the faint *click-click* of metal on vinyl. And the detective? A man who refuses to announce the crisis over the PA system because Rule 8-C forbids "alarmist announcements."

Warm, wry, and entirely original, *The Bus Driver's Lost Button* transforms a tiny domestic disaster into a love letter to the rhythms of ordinary life. It's a mystery where the stakes are personal, the sleuthing happens at twenty-two miles per hour, and the solution waits at the end of the line—if Arthur can just keep the bus on schedule long enough to find it. For anyone who's ever lost something small that meant everything, Route 7 is the ride you've been waiting for.