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The Twelve Bells: A Middle Grade Mystery Adventure
Paperback
Series: The Custodians, Book 3
Publisher: Bart Studio Press
Published: Sep 21 2026
Pages: 226
Weight: 0.59
Height: 0.52 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
Europe was seven stones. Asia was nine. The mountains ask you to pay.
Mia Bellamy's grandfather has never refused her a single truth - until a torn letter arrives from a boy in the Andes: Something is asking too much. Please hurry, if you still do that.
In the high peaks of South America, a third order of Custodians guards twelve stones hidden in Machu Picchu, the Nazca Lines, and the wonders of the Andes. Their house runs on ayni - sacred reciprocity: nothing wakes a stone except a payment. A truth. A memory. A fear, named out loud. And twelve-year-old Amaru Quispe has been paying alone for two years, and the mountain has started demanding more than any child should owe.
The team travels south with their grandfather - in the flesh, for the first time - only to discover the house has a history with him. And waiting at the first lost city, calm and unhurried, is the man Casimir Vane has answered to all along: a silver-voiced collector who doesn't steal stones. He collects proof - and he's been quietly preventing disasters for forty years, unclaimed, unbilled, while the houses hid.
He isn't offering to take the Twelve. He's offering Mia's grandfather the one thing sixty years can't buy:
To finish what they started. Together. Properly this time.
Inside this adventure, readers will find:
- Real history in every riddle - Inca stonework, a temple built as a throat, a desert that never forgets, and a fortress with three times the stone of the Great Pyramid
- A magic system with teeth - every stone demands an honest coin, and the mountain haggles
- The trilogy's secret finally named - the man behind the grey coat, and the war older than the friendship
- A team worth rooting for - a puzzle-solver, a bell-ringer, an archivist, a new keeper, and a grandfather with sixty years of homework
A fast-paced middle-grade mystery adventure filled with ancient secrets, real history, puzzles, family mysteries, friendship, and a race through the Andes.
Start with The Whispering Stones - or climb in here. The stones will catch you up.
Twelve payments. Twelve bells. And the mountain does not do refunds.
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