The Ragged Suitcase

Cricket Kelly is no ordinary twelve year-old. She's super smart and very observant, and she has one week until her birthday to prove it. Cricket's life transforms when she begins receiving strange clues that require her to solve the mystery of where she will spend her first summer vacation away from home. Enter kookie Aunt Lila, the orchestrator of a complex plot to take Cricket to Lighthouse Cove on Nantucket Island. Lila's work for the travel magazine, The Ragged Suitcase, prompts Cricket's investigation into some scary island mysteries. Following the clues to a long-ago disappearance, one of the first people Cricket encounters on Nantucket is Nate Tucker, a scary old man who holds a very old grudge. In an effort to escape Tucker, she meets Michael Adams, a dreamy fourteen year-old boy with sandy-blonde hair. Michael accompanies her on her mission to solve the infamous missing person's case of Hattie Mae Bellarose, a children's mystery writer from Savannah, Georgia. Armed with nothing but her courage, her smarts, and some old notebooks left to one of Hattie Mae's relatives, Cricket manages to turn this hundred year-old cold case into one that will go down in the record books. Cricket figures out the clues and just in time. More importantly though, she discovers that you shouldn't judge people before you get to know them.