The Boy in the Clockwork House

Join Alonzo, Mrs. Browne, Tommy and Gus in the third novel in the Clockwork Boy series. Alonzo is now established as a full-time inventor in his own workshop, Tommy has grown into a sharp young man devoted to managing all the details that Alonzo takes no interest in, and Mrs. Browne continues to guide her boys with her indomitable will and belief in what is fitting. A commission to renovate the dilapidated country house of Sir Gilbert, an old friend of Alice Merriweather, takes them all to rural Sussex to bring the manor into the twentieth century with Alonzo’s marvellous inventions, but things quickly begin to go wrong. Alonzo discovers that his old mate Gus is drinking again; strange accidents begin to plague the worksite. Sir Gilbert disdains the crippled Alonzo and is determined to drive a wedge between him and Alice. When a fortune teller predicts that Alice will ride off with a knight in shining armour, Gus and Alonzo fall out, and a tragic accident leaves Tommy on the brink of death, Alonzo is left alone—his worst fear. An eerie voice that comes to him in a dream counsels him to go back to go forward if he wants to find what he didn’t know he had lost. Finally, Alice and Gus’s young son disappear into the mysterious woods near the manor, and it is up to Alonzo to us use one of his inventions to find them… and to fight for them.