After twelve years, he was even getting pretty good at predicting who was going to show up when. And he was used to the bizarre folks who passed through the inn, some of them coming back every season like extended family who showed up to pinch your cheeks at holidays and then disappeared again.

Milo had lived at Greenglass House ever since he’d been adopted by Nora and Ben Pine when he was a baby. And of course the inn wasn’t only for smugglers, but that was who turned up most often, so that was how Milo thought of it. It was a long climb up to the inn from the waterfront by foot, or an only slightly shorter trip by the cable railway that led from the inn’s private dock up the steep slope of Whilforber Hill.

It was called Greenglass House, and it sat on the side of a hill overlooking an inlet of harbors, a little district built half on the shore and half on the piers that jutted out into the river Skidwrack like the teeth of a comb. It was an inn, actually a huge, ramshackle manor house that looked as if it had been cobbled together from discarded pieces of a dozen mismatched mansions collected from a dozen different cities. Milo Pine did not run a smugglers’ hotel, but his parents did. Milo’s home, Greenglass House, is itself something of a character in the book. It’s the start of Christmas vacation, and Milo was counting on some quiet down time with his parents. Here’s a snowed-in mystery for kids with some non-traditional elements. 373 pages.Ģ014 Cybils Finalist, Speculative Fiction for Elementary and Middle GradesĢ014 Sonderbooks Stand-out, #3 Children’s Fiction Clarion Books (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), 2014.

Greenglass house series order