Amazon Customer

Set in the spring, summer and fall of 1952, it's an entertaining and oft-hilarious coming-of-age tale told by an engaging 19-year-old New Jersey gas-station mechanic named Buddy Palumbo, whom several reviewers have likened to Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye. Buddy's a true working-class hero whose mean-spirited, bullying father is a union shop steward at a big chemical plant in Newark, and he wants Buddy to work there, too. But Buddy hates the place, and really wants to hang around the corner gas station—Finzio's Sinclair in Passaic—and learn how to fix cars.

Paul Copeland, a New Jersey county prosecutor, is still grieving the loss of his sister twenty years ago - the night she walked into the woods, never to be seen again. But now, a homicide victim is found with evidence linking him to the disappearance. The victim could be the boy who vanished along with Paul's sister. And, as hope rises that his sister could still be alive, dangerous secrets from his family's past threaten to tear apart everything Paul has been trying to hold together....

A tormented apprentice clock-maker - and a deadly knight in armour. A mechanical prince - and the sinister Dr Kalmenius, who some say is the devil... Wind up these characters, fit them into a story on a cold winter's evening and suddenly life and the story begin to merge - almost like clockwork...