Book overview
Boston, 1718. A man is found drowned inside a locked, bone-dry room - and the only person asking the right questions is a twelve-year-old printer's apprentice named Benjamin Franklin.
The town calls the death a judgment. Ben calls it a question. And the answer is hidden inside a plain black book with no title and no author - page after page of cipher that should not be possible to write. It is an almanac. But it does not guess the weather the way the penny almanacs do. It seems to know - storms, fires, shipwrecks, and the way fear moves through a frightened town, set down in advance, exactly right.
Ben has always been too curious for his own good. Now that curiosity has been noticed. There are people who have kept books like this hidden for a hundred years - and people who would use one to drown a ship and call it fate - and both have turned their attention to the boy learning to read the cipher by candlelight.
To stop them, Ben can't out-fight anyone or out-wait anyone. He has only what a printer's son has always had: a press, a plain fact, and the nerve to put the two together before a winter storm and a town's fear are turned into a weapon.
Young Benjamin Franklin and the Black Almanac is the first book of The Lantern Society Chronicles - historical mystery adventures for readers ages 10 and up, and for the grown-ups who still love a smart, atmospheric story. There are no wizards here and no magic. Only real, candle-lit colonial America, a cipher worth killing for, two secret societies, and one ordinary boy - long before he was a great man - discovering that the most dangerous thing in the world is the truth, plainly printed.
Real history. Hidden secrets. One boy who was never meant to find them.
Begin the series with Book One.
About the Author
R. C. Crumpler writes about the past - the history of war and nations, and the quiet decisions that shape ordinary lives - and about the gaps in the record where a storyteller is free to imagine what the documents never set down. The Lantern Society Chronicles grew out of exactly such a gap: the real, candle-lit Boston of 1718, a real twelve-year-old printer's apprentice named Benjamin Franklin, and the invented secret folded quietly inside it.
He holds a history degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is a lifelong, restless researcher, drawn to forgotten corners of the past and to the way large hidden forces press on the lives of people who never see them coming. Before he wrote books he served a long career in the United States Navy and Army - work that left him with a deep, firsthand skepticism of bureaucracy and of conventional wisdom, a skepticism his young hero, Ben, would recognize at once.
R. C. has written for both adult and younger readers, in fiction and in history. Whatever the audience, his books share one aim: the ground truth, plainly told - or, in historical fiction, real history combined with the imagination needed to fill in what the record never kept.
He writes from coastal North Carolina, where he runs several small businesses, teaches, and coaches football, and spends as much time as possible with his family.
