Greenglass House

by Kate Milford, Jaime Zollars

A rambling old inn, a strange map, an attic packed with treasures, squabbling guests, theft, friendship, and an unusual haunting mark this smart middle grade mystery in the tradition of the Mysterious Benedict Society books and The Westing Game.

  • Format: eBook
  • ISBN-13/ EAN: 9780544055551
  • ISBN-10: 0544055551
  • Pages: 224
  • Publication Date: 08/26/2014
  • Carton Quantity: 1

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About the Book
About the Authors
Excerpts
Reviews
  • About the Book
    New York Times Bestseller 

    National Book Award Nominee 

    Winner of the Edgar Award for Best Juvenile Mystery 

     

     

    It’s wintertime at Greenglass House. The creaky smuggler’s inn is always quiet during this season, and twelve-year-old Milo, the innkeepers’ adopted son, plans to spend his holidays relaxing. But on the first icy night of vacation, out of nowhere, the guest bell rings. Then rings again. And again. Soon Milo’s home is bursting with odd, secretive guests, each one bearing a strange story that is somehow connected to the rambling old house. As objects go missing and tempers flare, Milo and Meddy, the cook’s daughter, must decipher clues and untangle the web of deepening mysteries to discover the truth about Greenglass House—and themselves.

  • About the Author
  • Excerpts
    One
    The Smugglers’ Inn

    There is a right way to do things and a wrong way, if you’re going to run in hotel in a smugglers’ town.
       You shouldn’t make it a habit to ask too many questions, for one thing. And you probably shouldn’t be in it for the money. Smugglers are always going to be flush with cash as soon as they find a buyer for the eight cartons of fountain pen cartridges that write in illegal shades of green, but they never have money today. You should, if you are going to run a smugglers’ hotel, get a big account book and assume that whatever you write in it, the reality is, you’re going to get paid in fountain pen cartridges. If you’re lucky. You could just as easily get paid with something even more useless.
       Milo Pine did not run a smugglers’ hotel, but his parents did. It was an inn, actually; a huge, ramshackle manor house that looked as if it had been cobbled together from discarded pieces of a dozen mismatched mansions collected from a dozen different cities. It was called Greenglass House, and it sat on the side of a hill overlooking an inlet of harbors, a little district built half on the shore and half on the piers that jutted out into the river Skidwrack like the teeth of a comb. It was a long climb up to the inn from the waterfront by foot, or an only slightly shorter trip by the cable railway that led from the inn’s private dock up the steep slope of Whilforber Hill. And of course the inn wasn’t only for smugglers, but that was who turned up most often, so that was how Milo thought of it.
       Milo had lived at Greenglass House ever since he’d been adopted by Nora and Ben Pine when he was a baby. It had always been home. And he was used to the bizarre folks who passed through the inn, some of them coming back every season like extended family who showed up to pinch your cheeks at holidays and then disappeared again. After twelve years, he was even getting pretty good at predicting who was going to show up when. Smugglers were like bugs or vegetables. They had their seasons. Which was why it was so weird when the huge old bell on the porch, the one that was connected to the winch that drove the cable that in turn hauled the car up its tracks, started ringing.
       The old iron bell’s tone changed with the seasons too, and with the time of day. This evening, the first of winter vacation, was cold and brittle, and the snow had just begun to fall. Today, therefore, the bell itself had a brittle tone. It had a sound like a gulp of frigid air.
       Milo looked up from the coffee table, where he was working on a math problem. He liked to get his homework out of the way right off the bat so he could enjoy the holidays without thinking about school. He glanced at his mother, who was sprawled across the rag rug in front of the big stone fireplace, reading. “Someone’s coming up?” he asked incredulously.
       Mrs. Pine got to her feet, tucked her book under her arm, padded across to the foyer, and peered out the window by the door. “Someone wants to. We’d better go start the winch.”
       “But we never have guests the first week of vacation,” Milo protested. He felt a vague unease start to rise in his stomach and tried to swallow it down. Vacation couldn’t possibly get spoiled so quickly, could it? He’d only stepped off the launch that ferried the quayside kids to and from school a few hours ago.
       “Well, usually we don’t,” Mrs. Pine said as she laced up her boots, “but that’s not because we have a rule about it. It’s just because that’s the way it usually turns out.”
       “But it’s vacation!
       His mother shrugged and held out his coat. “Come on, kiddo.
       Be a gentleman. Don’t send your mom out into the cold alone.”
       Ah, the all-powerful gentleman card. Still grumbling, Milo got to his feet, quietly whispering “vacation vacation vacation” as he slouched across to join her. He had just about finished his homework. That was supposed to be the end of responsibility for a while.
       The bell rang again. Milo gave in to his frustration, stopped in the middle of the foyer with one boot on, and gave a single, furious yell with his hands clenched at his sides.
       Mrs. Pine waited with folded arms until he was finished. “Got that out of your system?” she asked gently. Milo scowled. “I know this isn’t the usual routine,” his mother added, “and I know you don’t like it when things don’t happen the way you expect.” She bent to hunt in the catch-all basket beside the door for a flashlight. “But look, being surprised isn’t always a bad thing.”
       The fact that it sounded logical didn’t change the way Milo felt, of course. But he nodded and finished getting dressed for the cold. He followed his mother out onto the porch and across the lawn to a break in the dark wall of bare white birches and blue-green firs that covered the hillside. There, in a pool of deeper shadow, the grass gave way to a stone landing.
       All his life, ever since he was really small, Milo had been very bothered by sudden changes of plan. More than bothered. Being surprised made him uneasy at the best of times. Now, tromping across the fresh snow in the bitter cold to haul a stranger up the hill, an unexpected stranger who was going to require him to work when all he really wanted was a quiet week or so with his parents and his house to himself . . . well, that made the uneasiness feel uncomfortably like panic.
       The flashlight’s beam pierced the pool of shadow, which flickered and melted into butter-gold; Mrs. Pine had turned on the light in the little pavilion hidden in the trees where the cable railway landed.
       The railway began a hundred yards below, at the river. There were other ways to get to the bottom of the gorge, or to get to the top if you were down. There was a steep and winding stair that ran more or less parallel to the railway and led to the same pavilion. There was also a road that snaked away from the inn and around the side of the hill down into the city proper, which was about a twenty-minute drive away. But only Milo, his parents, and the inn’s chef, Mrs. Caraway, ever really used the road. Guests didn’t come from the direction of the city. Guests came by river, sometimes in their own boats and sometimes by paying one of the dozens of old tars in the Quayside Harbors who’d ferry a person to Greenglass House in their equally aged boats for a few bucks. Given the option of being hauled up the steep hill in an antique conveyance that looked like a demented and oversized bumper car on rails or climbing three hundred and ten steps (Milo had counted), they always chose the former.
       Inside the stone-floored pavilion were a bench, a shed, and the steel tracks of the railway. Mrs. Pine unlocked the shed, and Milo followed her inside to where the heavy cable that ran between the tracks looped around the giant spindle of the winch. Thanks to a complex mess of gears, once you got the winch going, it did all the work necessary to haul the single car up the slope. But it was old, and the lever tended to stick. Getting it moving was easier with two pairs of hands.
       Together, Milo and his mother grasped the lever. “One, two, three!” Milo counted, and as one they hauled it forward. The cold metal of the gears whined...

  • Reviews
    A National Book Award Nominee 

    Winner of the Edgar Award for Best Juvenile Mystery 

    Nebula/Andre Norton Award Nominee 

    New York Times Bestseller 

     

    * "An enchanting, empowering, and cozy read." 

    Booklist, starred review 

     

    * "An abundantly diverting mystery." 

    Kirkus, starred review 

     

    "The legends and folktales Milford creates add to Nagspeake's charm and gently prepare the ground for a fantasy twist." 

    —Publishers Weekly 

     

    "Give this one to fans of Trenton Lee Stewart's The Mysterious Benedict Society.

    —School Library Journal 

     

    "The intricately woven connections, large cast of memorable characters, and beautifully detailed writing come together to make this exceptionally engaging story leap off the page." 

    —VOYA 

     

    "Milford employs a Westing Game level of cunning in setting up clues, revealing their importance, and immediately pivoting to a higher level of mystery, gratifying readers as she pulls them into the story." 

    —Horn Book Magazine

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