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The Blackwater Game
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Sep 5 2026
Pages: 192
Weight: 0.58
Height: 0.44 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
The game was meant to give Theo Bell his first murder. Nobody was supposed to die.
For his sixteenth birthday, the villagers of Blackwater Bay create an elaborate mystery for Theo to solve. The clues lead through the harbour, the abandoned signal house and the old maritime museum. At the final station, an actor is supposed to be waiting behind a curtain.
Instead, Theo finds Margaret Vale's body.
Three pieces of the birthday game do not belong-and they all point to Eliza Vale, Margaret's younger sister, who vanished inside Blackwater's tidal caves twenty-seven years earlier. The village says Eliza ran away. Margaret died believing the village was lying.
Theo turns to Adrian Mercer, the respected teacher who first encouraged his talent for solving mysteries. But Mercer understands Theo's methods better than anyone. He knows which details Theo will notice, which explanations he will trust and how Theo's feelings for Mercer's daughter, Clara, might prevent him from following the evidence too closely.
As the tide rises and Blackwater closes ranks, Theo must untangle two impossible timelines, separate an innocent game from a deadly deception and confront a question no puzzle has prepared him to answer:
What does he owe the truth when revealing it could destroy someone he cares about?
The Blackwater Game is an atmospheric young adult mystery about buried secrets, false memories and the dangerous cost of seeing what everyone else has chosen to ignore.
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