On England’s chalk-cliff coast in the 1950s, a sepia postcard shows a lantern lit at Battery Twelve on the very night the lighthouse famously failed. Twelve-year-old Tom and eleven-year-old Meg Archer suspect a fib—until a shuttered lamp in the sea caves blinks in a precise three-blink loop. Someone is signalling.
With Bramble the collie’s steady paw-point, Mr Quarles’s Morse know-how and Mrs Pennington’s unstoppable politeness at the station, the Lantern Lane League follow a fair-play trail of ledgers, timetables and greasy chains to a polished antiques dealer with a clever scheme. Time and tide won’t wait; neither will the ten-oh-five. Warm, clue-forward and cosy-peril safe, this classic-feeling mystery invites readers to solve it right alongside the League.