THE RUNNER — A Harlem Numbers Mystery, Book One | YA Historical Mystery | E-Book Digital Download

HARLEM, 1974. THE FIRST THING YOU LEARN AS A RUNNER IS THAT NOBODY LOOKS AT YOU.

The second thing you learn is to never, ever count on that.

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Teddy Pettaway is fourteen. Every morning he climbs nine hundred stairs collecting numbers slips — dimes and dreams folded into cigarette cellophane — for Miss Idella Crumpton's bank, the last independent policy book on Seventh Avenue. He has a runner's gifts: an exact memory, an invisible face, and a composition notebook he was told never to keep.

Then Mr. Threadgill's number comes in. 3-1-7. The number he has played for a dime every day for twenty-five years.

By the time Teddy reaches the fourth floor, the old man is dead in his chair — and on the table is a slip that cannot possibly be there.

By nightfall the block is saying Miss Idella owes six thousand dollars and won't pay. Somebody built that story. Somebody wanted the bank broken cheap. And somebody stood in a back room and watched a boy write it all down.

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A mystery about who gets believed, who gets paid, and what it costs to be the one person on the block who keeps a record.

Dream books. A beauty shop that is secretly a bank. A detective who takes the envelope. A captain of police who was first on scene in 1958 — too fast. A grandmother who sees everything from the back of the sanctuary. And one Post Office man's letter, never sent, written a line at a time for three years.

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FOR READERS OF

Walter Mosley · Jason Reynolds · Angie Thomas · Kwame Alexander
Historical mystery with a teenage detective the adults can't see.
Ages 14 and up. No graphic violence.

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THE HARLEM NUMBERS MYSTERIES

Book One — The Runner (1974)
Book Two — Dream Book (1975)
Book Three — The Figure (1976) — coming soon

Each book is a complete, self-contained mystery. Approx. 20,000 words / 80 pages.

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