The Lantern That Ticked Backward

The light did go dark that night. What nobody asked is why.
Twelve-year-old Desmond Reyes has spent his summer cataloging Port Verrick’s condemned lighthouse, tying paper tags to oilcans and mended chairs. On Friday the town council votes to tear it down. Their proof that it was never worth keeping is a report from 1926, which says the keeper fell asleep on watch and a ship full of people almost died on the rocks.
Then the antique lantern in the lamp room starts ticking backward, and Desmond falls exactly one hundred years, into the morning after that near-wreck.
He finds a keeper nobody believes, a girl named Odalys who has written down what the light did every night for five years, and a truth sitting in plain sight. The light went dark on purpose. The keeper shuttered his own beam for forty-two minutes to warn a ship steering into the shoal. The thing that saved eleven lives is the exact thing they blamed him for.
Desmond has two days, a signal code he read once, and a bad habit of deciding he already knows the answer.
The Lantern That Ticked Backward opens The Hourglass Keepers, a history-forward time-travel series for readers who like their adventures salty, their mysteries fair, and their heroes wrong twice before they are right. Perfect for fans of Ranger in Time, Magic Tree House, and Greenglass House.
On Friday the lighthouse comes down. In 1926 the hearing is at dawn. Both clocks are running.