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    The Secret of the Underground Room
    The Secret of the Underground Room
    The Secret of the Underground Room
    Ebook140 pages2 hours

    The Secret of the Underground Room

    By John Bellairs

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    A young hero and his professor friend set out to save a priest from a ghost, in this novel by the author of The House with a Clock in Its Walls
     
    Aside from the eccentric Professor Childermass, young sleuth Johnny Dixon’s best friend may be Father Higgins, the kindly priest at the local church. When Higgins is transferred to the congregation in the tiny town of Rocks Village, Johnny and the professor are afraid they won’t see their old friend ever again. But they’ll be reuniting with Father Higgins sooner than they think—and the thing that brings them together will be positively out of this world.
     
    No sooner has Father Higgins moved than he begins seeing a ghost lurking around the church. The apparition is a young girl who never speaks, but has a habit of leaving cryptic notes around Higgins’s house. When Higgins disappears, Johnny and the professor follow his trail, embarking on a haunting quest that will lead them all the way to England.
     
    In The Secret of the Underground Room, this multimillion-selling, Edgar Award–winning author offers a good old-fashioned ghost story packed with adventure and suspense.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateApr 1, 2014
    ISBN9781497625419
    The Secret of the Underground Room
    Author

    John Bellairs

    John Bellairs is beloved as a master of Gothic young adult novels and fantasies. His series about the adventures of Lewis Barnavelt and his uncle Jonathan, which includes The House with a Clock in Its Walls, is a classic. He also wrote a series of novels featuring the character Johnny Dixon. Among the titles in that series are The Curse of the Blue Figurine; The Mummy, the Will, and the Crypt; and The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull. His stand-alone novel The Face in the Frost is also regarded as a fantasy classic, and among his earlier works are St. Fidgeta and Other Parodies and The Pedant and the Shuffly. Bellairs was a prolific writer, publishing more than a dozen novels before his untimely death in 1991.

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    Reviews for The Secret of the Underground Room

    4.5/5

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    • 3/5
      Not one of my favorites (of Bellairs) but still a fun read. Slow start, and the young protagonists Johnny and Fergie end up simply being there for the action, rather than taking much part in the actual culmination (though they get themselves there int he first place). The suspense, though is as chilling as any of Bellairs' books. And of course, they're just as good for adults as for kids.
    • 4/5
      I've been taking my time with the wife's Bellairs' books because I didn't really want to run out of them. Time and again I've devoured a favourite author far too quickly and have been left with nothing to go back to... so it's been a while since I last dabbled with some Bellairs. This is a good one, as are pretty much all of them actually, only marred by a slightly under developed plot. It felt like there was one or two set pieces almost missing from the book and the final denouement (rather wonderfully on the isle of Lundy) just slightly fizzles out. But there's so many good things to say about it - VERY good portrayal of Britain and Bristol, lovely sense of the UK in the 1950s, nicely judged placing of little British elements like Newcastle Brown Ale and explaining what ground floors are to an American audience... and still the same wonderfully creepy sense of genuine horror that Bellairs always makes his own. Why Bellairs isn't better known in the UK I'll never know... a genuine tragedy

    Book preview

    The Secret of the Underground Room - John Bellairs

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