A scavenger hunt takes a sinister turn in the third novel in the Eek! series, tales to scare you silly!
FINDERS KEEPERS
by Jeff Strand
Sourcebooks, April 2025
In the small town of Farlow, mysterious advertisements appear for a summer scavenger hunt. Twelve-year-old Maggie and her friends can’t wait. They have their team, and more than bragging rights, they want that huge cash prize.
On the big day, a strange man welcomes everybody to the game. The first items are ridiculously easy (« An egg? Seriously? »), but they quickly grow more difficult. When getting one of the items requires an actual crime―breaking into the school after dark―Maggie loses one of her teammates. But the others manage to steal Mr. Kramer’s favorite mug.
A bone from the cemetery seems like it’s as dark as the game can get, but when they’re asked to bring back a human head, nobody wants to play anymore. But it’s too late to quit…
Jeff Strand is the Bram-Stoker Award-winning author of more than sixty books, which is a pretty good number but not as many as R.L. Stine. Cemetery Dance magazine said, “No author working today comes close to Jeff Strand’s perfect mixture of comedy and terror.” He loves barbecue, sugary drinks, sushi, and spooky stuff. You can visit his Gleefully Macabre website at www.jeffstrand.com. .
The moon is stuck like a broken clock in the midnight sky, the sun a distant memory. No one in this quiet seaside town can remember how long this unnatural darkness has lasted. No one, that is, except for the curious girl who lives in the graveyard, caring for the dead: twelve-year-old Madeline Tock. In gratitude, the departed whisper their worries to her: beware this endless night and she who causes it.
On his twelfth birthday, Jackson « Jax » Freeman arrives at Chicago’s Union Station alone, carrying nothing but the baggage of a scandal back in his hometown. He’s been sent away from home to live with relatives he barely knows. But even worse are the strangers who accost him at the train station, including a food vendor who throws dust in his face and a conductor who tries to steal his skin.
Luna rides a battered old broom that keeps crashing itself into the school pond. She has a witch’s hat and wand and sometimes she’s quite good at magic, but she isn’t completely sure that she’s a real witch. She doesn’t have a familiar for one thing, and she doesn’t know where she came from-only that she was found by three witches who she now calls her aunts. When she swaps her moonstone ring for an Australian boobook owl in the Lost Forest, the mysterious bird seller makes her promise to keep the bird hidden for as long as she can. This is not easy when you live with very inquisitive aunts. And it’s not easy when you find out that the fearsome Madame Valadon, the Best Witch in Paris, is missing her boobook owl and she’s sure that Luna knows something about it.
