In an evocative and fast-paced adventure on the high seas and on a faraway island an orphan boy named Peter and his mysterious new friend, Molly, overcome bands of pirates and thieves in their quest to keep a fantastical secret safe and save the world from evil. Bestselling authors Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson have turned back the clock and revealed a wonderful story that precedes J. M. Barrie’s beloved Peter Pan. Peter and the Starcatchers is brimming with richly developed characters from the scary but somehow familiar Black Stache and the ferocious Mister Grin to the sweet but sophisticated Molly and the fearless Peter. Page after page of riveting adventure take readers on a journey from the filthy, crime-ridden port of old England across the turbulent sea. Aboard the Never Land is a trunk that holds a magical substance that amazes—just a sprinkle and wounds heal and just a dusting and people can fly.

Roiling seas and dangerous thunderstorms are the backdrop for battles at sea. Bone-crushing waves eventually land our characters on Mollusk Island—where the action really heats up.

In this riveting and adventure-packed follow-up to the award-winning, The New York Times bestseller Peter and the Starcatchers, Peter leaves the relative safety of Mollusk Island—along with his trusted companion Tinker Bell—for the cold, damp, dangerous streets of London. On a difficult journey across the sea, he and Tink discover the dark and deadly, slithering part-man/part-creature Lord Ombra, who is intent on recovering the missing starstuff—a celestial dust that contains unimagined powers. In London, Peter attempts to track down the indomitable Molly, hoping that together they can combat Ombra’s determined forces. But London is not Mollusk Island; Peter is not the boy he used to be; and Lord Ombra—the Shadow Master—is unlike anything Peter, or the world, has ever seen.

In this double-stranded, nearly nonstop close to the Starcatchers trilogy (at least its direct line; the authors are also producing spin-offs), peaceful Mollusk Island is overrun by savage invaders, while Peter, acerbic Tinkerbell and the Starcatchers are away in the North African land of Rundoon battling the darkness-loving Others. For one long pause, the reconstituted shadow-eater Lord Ombra stops to explain in great detail the Others’s scheme to rewind the entire universe back to its pre-Big Bang state, and to reveal that the fabulously valuable “starstuff” that falls to Earth occasionally is effluent from “a leak in the plumbing of the universe.”

Aidan and Sarah Cooper have no idea what they’re getting into one afternoon when they discover a mysterious coded document in a secret compartment of an antique English desk their father recently bought at an auction. Something about the document seems familiar to Sarah, and that night she realizes what it is: the document seems to be referring to some books she has read—the Starcatchers series, about the origin of Peter Pan. But how could that be? The document seems far older than the books. And of course, the books are just stories. . . .

Curious, Sarah and Aidan begin to decipher the mysterious document. At firs it’s a game —unraveling the mystery piece by piece, each piece leading them to a new, deeper puzzle. But soon the game turns strange—and scary. They discover that the “stories” are real, and that what they thought was a fictional battle between good and evil is still going on. And the scariest part is: They have become part of it. Pursued by a being that can take any form and will stop at nothing to get what it wants from them, Aidan and Sarah embark on a desperate, thrilling quest for help—a quest that leads them to some unforgettable people in some unlikely places, including one that’s not supposed to exist at all. At each step they must solve new puzzles and escape new dangers, all the while knowing that if they fail, the evil they are fleeing will be let loose on an unsuspecting world.