The Night House Files: The Wintermoor Lights

In this second book from bestselling author Dan Smith, top-secret organisation The Night House has once again opened up its files to expose the truth behind the Wintermoor lights, information that has previously been kept hidden for years.

Teenagers in the small town of Wintermoor have started acting strangely after seeing moving lights in the night sky. Tara’s best friend Zoe was one of the first to see them and has changed overnight, no longer wanting to spend time with Tara and actively ignoring her. She is now hanging around with other pupils acting in the same weird aggressive manner, meeting in secret and chanting a bizarre string of numbers. The adults around them, including the police, refuse to listen to anything that Tara is saying, dismissing it as hysteria or some kind of hoax.

As the number of her classmates becoming affected by something unexplained increases, Tara starts to investigate the mystery of the lights, but finds herself becoming more and more isolated, even facing a terrifying incident where some of her former friends chase her through the town and corner her in the library. Could this be an attempt to stop her research? When she finally follows a group of entranced children into the woods late one night, what she sees next is beyond anything she ever expected, but will affect the whole town and is something that Tara will never forget.

Dan Smith has once again treated us to a clever and fast-paced spooky mystery adventure, creating additional tension and reality with the use of diary entries, interview transcripts and newspaper clippings alongside Tara’s story, perfectly accompanied by Brookes’ atmospheric and sometimes creepy illustrations. Beautifully packaged in Barrington Stokes’ accessible format, this is another clever sci-fi thriller that keeps you guessing right until the very end.