The Ghost of the Gun Battery (Paperback or Softback)

Something is moaning on the headland at Point Peron - and whatever it is, it empties a school camp in under an hour.

Barry Carter is fourteen, constitutionally unable to lie to his mother, and - as the framed commendation on the HQ wall attests - President of the Safety Bay Six. When Year Nine camp ends two days early after an unearthly sound drives twenty-six boys and two teachers from their bunks, Barry knows, with the reluctant certainty of a boy who has been right about this sort of thing before, that his Easter holidays are gone.

Back on the foreshore with the gang - Annie with her seaweed-coloured notebook, Kath with her weather-eye, Vic with his improving statistics, and Rose Sheridan armed at all times with the loudest voice on the coast - the Safety Bay Six set out to find the source. What they find is layered: a ghost that was built; a man with a metal detector working a tightening grid toward the ridge; and beneath everything, a soldier named Tom Moss who walked out to his watch on an April night in 1943, never came back, and has been quietly blamed by his town ever since.

Equal parts detective story, wartime mystery, and love letter to the coast of Western Australia, The Ghost of the Gun Battery is a novel about the people nobody watched - and what happens when five kids decide that somebody should.

Patrick Maher spins curious tales of imagination and mystery, set in other times and other worlds for readers of all ages, where psychic abilities, science, and medicine can easily leap about in the playground of the mind together. His stories are set in worlds that seem normal but one step removed, where deep, enduring friendships are valued.