Blood Moon Rider (Florida Historical Fiction for Youth)

Accelerated Reader Quiz #109073. Level 6.6

"I tried to block the legend of the blood moon—that it signaled the death of someone close to you—from my mind."

Harley Wallace has suffered through an incredible run of bad luck. His father died fighting in the Pacific during World War II, and his stepmother abandoned him. The Marines refused to take him, and now he is kicked off a bus in the middle of Nowhere, Florida, where he celebrates his fourteenth birthday as a prisoner in a hick jail. As if that weren't bad enough, Harley is placed in the custody of his unwelcoming old grandfather.

As Harley and his grandfather struggle to establish a family relationship and make peace with the demons of the past, the murder of Grandfather Wallace's cowman and best friend leads them to suspect that an evil connected to the war may have taken root on the old man's sprawling cattle ranch. With German U-boats lurking in the placid waters of the Gulf, an old friend enlists Grandfather and Harley in a top-secret operation in the hammocks and palmettos of Florida's Big Bend region.

When Grandfather Wallace mysteriously disappears, Harley and his new friend Beth are thrust into a web of danger that reaches far beyond Florida's Gulf Coast. Harley and Beth begin a hazardous quest, racing against the clock in a desperate effort to save the old man. Riding into the marshes under the harsh glow of a “blood moon," they discover peril, new friends, ruthless enemies, and the true meaning of family.

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A fifth-generation Floridian, Zack Waters has a B.A. degree from the University of Florida and a law degree from Memphis State University. For the past twenty years, he has taught literature and language arts at Rome Middle School in Rome, Georgia. He is a frequent contributor to Civil War publications on the topic of Florida’s Confederate soldiers.