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Jackmiester
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Mar 6 2026
Pages: 166
Weight: 0.51
Height: 0.35 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
A missing boy; an online game that mirrors active crimes; a woman driven by a past that keeps forcing her in way over her head.
Lucy, the queen of fresh starts, is forging a new beginning in Halifax, Canada, by buying into librarian Susan Waverley's floundering online research business, Info Detection. But as a tenacious and enthusiastic info explorer, Lucy's not interested in doing contract work for the Halifax Port Authority. Instead, she'd rather drag Susan and their hacker assistant head-first into the deep end of the Internet cesspool searching for the bottom-feeders who prey on vulnerable kids.
When Info Detection investigates an online gaming site in which Susan's nephew, Jason, is involved, they discover chilling parallels between the game's imagery and local landmarks, including Nova Scotia's famous Peggy's Cove Lighthouse. The game's AI figures of pirates dressed in sou'westers floating back and forth before the lighthouse soon loses their charm when a nearby fish plant is torched and millions of dollars worth of lobsters are stolen with links to the game.
And then Jason is kidnapped.
As the Info Detection team plunge deeper into the hunt for this international crime ring, they must peal back layers of clues in both the real and the virtual world but the endgame remains the same: extortion, kidnapping, smuggling, and murder using kids to do the dirty work. Soon the team discover the biggest lead of all: a map illustrating the Jackmeister kingdom with a Nova Scotian overlay. That map sends the team driving into an icy winter's night to where multiple arsons set flame to the province's fisheries as a decoy to mask the main event. And that event could spell the end of the gang's child hostages as well as the last chance to catch the pirates before they sail into international waters.
But first, Lucy must overcome her terror of the ocean, the cold, and the dark in order to tackle these murderous mariners in their own element. If that means hitching a ride on a lobster boat amid a squall, so be it. If she can save even one kid, maybe then she can forgive herself for not saving her own all those years ago.Welcome to Info Detection, book 1 of Virtually Gone, where the sea and Canada's East Coast launches mystery, twisty plots, and characters to both love and detest.
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