Everyone said the bell decided whether the town ate. Then it rang wrong.
Twelve-year-old Rory Pim keeps a notebook full of things other people don't think to write down — which is how she becomes the only person in Lantern Cove who notices that the Tideheart, the town's ancient bell, groaned before it ever went sour.
By morning, the Founder's Cup is gone, stolen from a locked vault, and Rory's grandmother — the Bellkeeper who's rung that bell true for forty years — is the only suspect anyone wants to consider. Rory has thirteen days, until the year's lowest tide, to clear her grandmother's name before the town seals the tower for good.
With her rival-turned-reluctant-partner from the school paper, a councilwoman's son risking his mother's trust, and a mysterious young tinker who knows more than he's saying, Rory follows a trail of boot prints, buried tunnels, and a hundred-and-thirty-year-old family grudge nobody in Lantern Cove wants to talk about — straight to a secret the whole town agreed, quietly, to forget.
Ring True is the first Lantern Cove Mystery: a small-town whodunit about the difference between the easy story and the true one, and what it costs a family to carry a promise alone.
