The Lockout Club · Book 1
A middle-grade mystery — Book 1 of seven
When a four-hundred-dollar charge appears on his father's bank statement at three-fourteen in the morning, twelve-year-old Wyatt Reyes follows the trail straight to the friendly little electronics shop on Main Street — and into a small-town crime that has, quietly, been touching every household on his block.
Synopsis
It is 7:09 on the first Monday of summer break, and Wyatt Reyes is standing on the stairs of his family's small-town home, listening to his father say a word into a kitchen phone he has only ever heard him say at funerals. There is a charge on the family card from a website called QuickBet seven seven seven for four hundred dollars and seventeen cents, processed at three-fourteen in the morning. Nobody in the house has ever heard of that website.
"Dad. Did you give him your password?"
What follows is the careful, slow-building work of three twelve-year-olds and one nineteen-year-old college sister piecing together what has actually been happening in their small Cypress Grove neighbourhood. The trail leads to Cypress Tech, a friendly little electronics-repair shop on Main Street run by a polite young man named Trevor Keene — the kind of place where everybody's grandmother goes when her laptop is slow.
Across eighteen patient chapters, Wyatt and his best friends Devo and Priya — guided over the phone by Wyatt's older sister Marisol, a community-college sophomore studying cybersecurity — assemble a spreadsheet, a stakeout, a honeypot trap, and finally an FBI agent at a folding chair in a strip-mall parking lot at sunset. Beneath the mystery lies a quiet primer in three lessons every modern household needs: separating administrator from daily-user accounts, using a password manager, and giving the adults in the house separate inboxes for separate parts of life.
It is a book about being twelve, about trusting the right adults at the right moment, and about the small careful habits that keep a family — and a neighbourhood — safer.
Inside the Book
Each lesson is woven into a piece of the unfolding mystery — Wyatt and his friends learn what they need to know in the order they need it, and the reader learns alongside them.
Lesson One
When Marisol opens the family laptop and sees a stranger's wallpaper underneath the login prompt, she draws keychains on a torn-out notebook page to explain the difference between an account that can change anything and an account that can only do its work. The whole family runs on one keychain. That's the problem.
Lesson · Admin vs. standard accounts
Lesson Two
Marisol takes Wyatt to a coffee shop on Main and watches him list, on a single sheet of notebook paper, every password he has ever made. Nineteen of nineteen are weak, reused, or already in known breaches. By the end of forty-two minutes, he has a vault, a master password he has written on a piece of card stock in his old Cub Scout vest, and a different relationship with the internet.
Lesson · Password managers
Lesson Three
At six in the morning at the kitchen table, Marisol explains to Dad that an email address is also a key — and that a man with one email address has, in effect, one keychain. By the end of breakfast, Dad has four inboxes for four parts of his life, and the bad people, when they come, will only be able to find one of them.
Lesson · Segregated email
Who It's For
A real mystery with real stakes, told in a kid's own voice — careful, funny, and never talking down.
The book that starts the digital-safety conversation without being a lecture — and that adults end up taking notes from.
A discussion-rich middle-grade mystery with built-in lesson moments — admin accounts, password managers, segregated email.
The book to give the grandchild who loves a mystery — and to read first, because the lessons inside apply to all of us.
Release-Day Notification
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Frequently Asked
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Paperback and eBook will launch on Amazon (Kindle Direct Publishing) first. Additional retailers may follow. Notify-me subscribers receive direct links the day the book goes on sale.
The book is written for readers age ten and up. The mystery is suspenseful but never graphic; the prose is paced for both confident middle-grade readers and adults reading along. Many parents and grandparents who pick it up to skim end up reading the whole thing.
Yes — The Lockout Club is a seven-book mystery series. Each book teaches a different practical concept of modern digital life through a fresh, self-contained mystery. Book 2, The Forever Ledger, follows soon after; the full arc concludes with Book 7, Pattern Match.
Three real-world habits, taught the way habits should be taught — by watching characters need them. Book 1 covers the difference between administrator and standard user accounts, the use of a password manager, and the practical reasons for keeping personal, financial, shopping, and "junk" email addresses separate. No prior tech knowledge is required.
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