The Great Batter Robbery

Sixty-one years, three brass plaques, and a locked biscuit tin nobody has ever seen opened - that's the Bay Fryer's whole reputation, gone from a cool room that was locked the entire time. No broken window. No forced door. Just a tin-shaped nothing on a shelf, and a landlord's lease letter sitting on the spike like a clock starting.

The Safety Bay Six follow the only clues going: a salt-dried footprint two sizes too small for any grown suspect, a sleeve of stolen drone footage, and a list of names that keeps getting shorter and less convenient. A seagull-feuding neighbour. A drone-happy influencer. A chip shop owner with very big ideas and, it turns out, a chest freezer. One by one, they fall away - until the trail does the one thing nobody wanted it to do.

It points at their own school.

What waits at the end of it isn't the thief anyone was hoping for. It's a boy with two years of bad history, a mother counting shifts at a kitchen table, and a stolen tin getting heavier under his bed every single night he can't make himself put it back.

Now the gang has to solve the part no notebook has a box for: not who took it.

What do you do with a thief you understand?

Featuring a blackout, a camp-stove kitchen, a stolen golf umbrella, and a judging delivered in a storm on a seawall in front of half the town - this is The Safety Bay Six at their funniest, their fairest, and their most generous.

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.