THE CLUE IN THE OLD MILL Cole Mitchell Mysteries, Book 4 Jake Bannister Lock Publishing It comes in at 11:47 on a Tuesday night, a girl's voice cutting through static on Cole Mitchell's ham radio. Terrified. Urgent. Transmission boosted far beyond what a standard radio should carry. "It's hidden in the walls. If they figure out that I know..." Then silence. Not a fade. Not interference. Someone killed the signal on purpose. Cole hits record, calls Scott, and by morning the crew has the transmission traced to a single building, the Old Riverside Mill in Pinecrest. Condemned since 2001. Partially collapsed. And according to every record that exists, completely abandoned. Except someone put a brand-new padlock on a rotting side door. The girl on the radio is Leslie Champ, thirteen years old, and she's been investigating the mill alone for three weeks, documenting footprints in work boots, men in dark clothes, and a mystery buried in the walls that dates back to 1952. She wanted someone to know the truth before they found her. Cole, Scott, and Jenna make it inside. They find her notebook. Her radio setup. Evidence of a seventy-year-old secret sealed behind false brickwork on the third floor. Then the voices start. Two men cross the factory floor below them, flashlight beams cutting through the dark. Heavy boots. Rough voices. And a name Cole wasn't expecting to hear: Brennen . As in Tommy Brennen, dead for seventy years, mostly forgotten, and apparently connected to something so valuable that two men are tearing apart a condemned building brick by brick to find it. Cole, Scott, and Jenna press flat against rusted machinery, barely breathing, while the men search the room thirty feet away. Scott's phone is recording every word. And every word is a threat. Leslie Champ got too close. They shut down her radio. They know she's been watching. And they aren't worried about a thirteen-year-old kid who can't prove a thing. They don't know Cole Mitchell just read her notebook. The Clue in the Old Mill is the Cole Mitchell series firing on all cylinders, a buried secret, a girl who vanished after crying for help, a pair of dangerous men who know what's hidden in those walls, and a crew of kids crouched in the dark on the third floor of a collapsing building with exactly one exit and exactly zero backup. History. Hidden treasure. And a seventy-year-old mystery that someone is willing to do very bad things to keep buried. Cole promised his parents he'd ask for help before things got dangerous. He ran out of time for that conversation about forty-five minutes ago. Some secrets don't stay in the walls forever. And some cases don't wait for daylight. Get the full case file at colecase.com Jake Bannister, available in print and digital wherever books are sold.