• Age: 9 to 12
• Grade: 4 to 7

Set in the '60s at a summer camp, The Mystery of the Haunted Dancehall is a spooky, atmospheric middle-grade story for fans of classic ghost stories, unlikely friendships and intriguing mysteries.

Bee's mom has a job in New York City for the summer, so Bee is being sent to summer camp. She's not excited about it. Being around other people is hard for her, plus she knows nothing about campfires, she's not a good swimmer and she's never even been in a canoe.

When she first arrives, things go pretty much as she expected. The other girls either make fun of her or ignore her, and the woods surrounding the camp give her the creeps: she keeps hearing elusive music coming from somewhere in the distance, and there's something off about it.

But then Zippy comes on the scene — an oddball like Bee, but with a lot more confidence and hard-won knowledge gleaned from many summers spent at this exact camp. And most importantly, Zippy has also discovered mysterious behavior going on at the camp: the older girls from the Hawks cabin are sneaking out to do . . . something. They're always exhausted, and their flashlight batteries are running out at an alarming rate. But their counselors are never woken up by girls sneaking out, no one on staff doing nightly rounds ever sees them outside the cabin, and even when they start doing a bed check at night, the girls all seem to be in their bunks.

Zippy and Bee are on the case, and with the help of an unlikely ally, they try to figure out what the Hawks are up to. But they soon discover there's more going on than just the usual summer camp hijinks. How are the Hawks getting out at night? What is the deal with the (very cute) mysterious boy who seems to be working with the groundskeeper? Where is the distant music coming from? And what does the elusive camp founder know about all of it?

A writer and storyteller, Charis Cotter has published several critically acclaimed children's books, including a series of biographies about extraordinary children and a book about international ghosts. Toronto Between the Wars: Life in the City 1919-1939 received the 2005 Heritage Toronto Award of Excellence. Most recently, The Swallow: A Ghost Story won the 2015 IODE Violet Downey Book Award, was named an Honour Book by the Canadian Library Association for 2015, and has been nominated for four 2016 children's choice awards across Canada. She lives in Western Bay, NL.

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