Wish Bound - River Penumbra

**When a distress call comes from a struggling fishing town, fairy godmother Grace Thornfield discovers that some mysteries cut deeper than sabotage - and some bonds are harder to break than any spell.**

The catalyst stone programme is working. Seven sites across New England, dozens of manifesting children, a network of practitioners learning to nurture abilities that no textbook was written for. Grace should be celebrating. Instead, she's driving north to Saltmarsh, New Hampshire, where a young practitioner's frightened message has turned a success story into a crisis. The children have changed. A boy who drew pictures that made people feel warm is producing nightmares. A girl who radiated comfort is generating cold that drives her classmates away. A nine-year-old telekinetic is breaking everything he touches. The catalyst stone reads normal. The protocols have been followed. And nobody can explain why the programme that works everywhere else is failing here. Grace's investigation takes her through a community on the edge of revolt, past a Guild assessor whose scepticism might be principled or might be something darker, and into a mystery where every suspect she eliminates leaves a stranger question behind. The logical answer doesn't fit. The impossible answer does. And the person Grace trusts most in Saltmarsh may be the one she understands least. With the committee demanding results, parents pulling children from school, and a three-week deadline before the programme is suspended permanently, Grace must solve a mystery that keeps changing shape - and face the possibility that protecting the truth will cost more than exposing it. The eighth book in The Fairy Godmother Detective Agency series takes the fairy godmother out of Willowbrook and into unfamiliar territory - where the Willowbrook model meets its hardest test, the mystery goes deeper than anyone suspected, and the real magic is the kind that happens when a fairy godmother sits across from someone in pain and says *tell me.*

*Perfect for fans of Sofie Kelly, Amanda Flower, and anyone who knows that the hardest mysteries aren't about who did it - they're about why.*