The Weird Map in Mr. Glimm's Skull

Something went wrong the night Felix Jones discovered the hatch in the boiler room.Not wrong like forgotten homework or a particularly bad Tuesday. Wrong like a trapdoor with Russian writing on it wrong. Like school caretaker found dead with a machine projecting a secret map out of his skull wrong.And then things got really interesting.Felix is twelve, new in the peculiar village of Wild Meadow, and used to figuring things out alone. His dad's job is complicated. His mum pretends everything is fine. His one friend, William, would really rather not be involved in whatever this is. The caretaker, the strange Mr. Glimm, left Felix a brass key, a mop bucket, and a note that said: Do not let her open my head.He was too late to stop that part.But what Felix uncovers beneath the school is bigger than one caretaker's death: a Cold War listening station drilled into something far older - something ancient and hungry that has been sealed beneath the English countryside for thousands of years. Something that calls itself Mother. And Mother has been waiting.She's been waiting for someone exactly like Felix.Beneath the basement, beyond the trapdoor with its Soviet-era warning signs, through corridors that shouldn't exist, Felix and William find a world that should have stayed buried: maps encoded in human skulls, drones with too many legs, and a psychic signal that rewrites memory if you listen too long. And somewhere in the static, the ghost of Mr. Glimm is trying to warn them: she cannot be allowed to escape.The Weird Map in Mr. Glimm's Skull is a full-throttle British adventure - part spy thriller, part science fiction, part ghost story - with one of the sharpest twelve-year-olds in middle grade fiction at its centre. Felix Jones is the kind of kid who picks locks with his dad's tools, builds radios from biscuit tins, and takes the most unsettling things he encounters completely in his stride.It is also, quietly, a story about fathers and sons. About what we pass on, what we protect, and what happens when the secrets adults carry finally come spilling out of the ground.Ages 8-14. Book 1 of the Felix Jones Adventures. Boys' Adventure from Raconteur Press.