Red Ledger – Kobo eBook

Six names. Red ink. No dots.

Jonah Hale has never forgotten anything in his life, and that is the problem. When the Hale Six bring home the red ledger of the clockmaker who ran Istanbul’s ghosts, Jonah reads all one hundred and ninety-two pages once, by candlelight, and keeps every one of them: forty-eight years of judges, customs officers, bankers and children, every person the book was holding, each marked with a colored dot. The last page holds six more names in red. Nadia, Eli, Marcus, Theo, Jonah, Lou. No dots. Not yet.

Then a woman comes over the roofs of Linden Street in the rain, opens the family safe in under a minute, and vanishes with the book in a white jet bound for Zurich. From Izmir to Beirut to Tbilisi, people with red dots beside their names start turning up dead. Someone is clearing the board before a big move, and the pieces left standing may be the Hale kids themselves.

On Lou’s twelfth birthday, a letter arrives from a Zurich lawyer. Their grandfather, the Widower, is dead, and the six of them are named in his will, not only as heirs but as assets of his trust. To claim it, someone must walk into a private bank on the Paradeplatz and present the one thing it requires: a small red book with a gold kingfisher on the cover. The book is gone. But every word of it is still in Jonah’s head, and the most dangerous people in Europe have just worked out that the boy who remembers everything is the only copy left.

From the old town of Zurich to the fog over the lake and the banks of the Rhine in Basel, the Hale Six have to decide what their grandfather’s ledger is worth, and what they are worth to the people hunting it, without letting any one of them carry it alone.

ALL SIX. OR NOTHING.

Red Ledger is Book 8 of The Hale Six, a family thriller series by R. E. Addison Jr.