Closed for the Season
Winner of the Edgar Award for Best Juvenile Mystery.
Two friends set out to solve the years-old mystery of a murder, testing their friendship and placing them in danger, in this creepy thriller by suspense master Mary Downing Hahn.
A pair of thirteen-year-old boys investigate the unsolved theft and murder that took place in the old house one boy's family has just moved into. Their quest takes them to the highest and lowest levels of society in their small Maryland town, and eventually to a dark and derelict amusement park where someone will go to any length to shut down their investigation for good.
Themes of adjusting to a new town, navigating complex friendships, and resisting a bully are deftly explored in this eerie page-turner.
Mary Downing Hahn
Mary Downing Hahn (born 1937) is an award winning American author of young adult novels. After graduating college, she worked as an art teacher, a college instructor, and a children's librarian in Prince George's Public Library System. She published her first novel, The Sara Summer, at the age of 41. Since then, she has been a full-time writer. Her ghost story Wait till Helen Comes was the winner of 12 state children's book awards and she received the Scott O'Dell award for her World War II novel Stepping on the Cracks. She currently lives in Columbia, Maryland. (Bowker Author Biography).
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Reviews and Comments
Mary Downing Hahn is apparently a fairly popular and award-winning author of horror and suspense books for children in the U.S. She specializes in ghost stories. I read Closed for the Season, in which 13-year-old Logan moves with his parents to a new town and meets Arthur. Arthur tells him all the most important things about the small town, including that an elderly woman was murdered in Logan’s house and money was stolen from the local amusement park before that. So the boys set out to solve these unsolved mysteries.