The Deer Park Mysteries · Book 4
The False Panel
Release: 15 December 2026
February 1972, and the lights go out by rota.
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February 1972. The miners are on strike, the lights go out by rota, and the whole of Sevenoaks is living by candlelight.
Roy is fourteen, and he and Jackie have done something they shouldn’t: slipped out before dawn with rifles they aren’t supposed to touch. That’s how they come to see a break-in that nobody else saw, and why they can’t tell anyone without confessing.
Somebody is using the blackouts to burgle big houses round Sevenoaks. Every lead points back towards the Keeper’s Cottage itself, and to a story about hiding places nobody has opened in centuries. The police have a tip-off that gets them nowhere, and the longer Roy and Jackie keep quiet, the harder owning up becomes.
It takes a careful eye to see what has been in plain sight all along.
Book Four of The Deer Park Mysteries, for readers aged 12 to 17.
Opening extract
The fires came first. Strike or no strike, they always did.
Roy was down the ladder-stair at ten to five on Wednesday the sixteenth of February, 1972, and he went out to the shed first and started the Lister, the way he did every morning, and came back and put the kitchen light on with his elbow because his hands were full of newspaper. The bulb came on, yellow and ordinary, and buzzed a little, the way it had buzzed every morning of his life. He looked up at it with suspicion.
"You'll go off later," he told it. "They said so on the wireless."
The bulb, which had no opinion about the National Coal Board, went on buzzing.