A shop that robbed itself. A camera that saw everything and knew nothing. A detective who has been bored for a hundred and thirty-one years.

Sam Wong-Watson is eleven, lives above her family's noodle stall in Hong Kong, and writes down things that don't add up. On the night of the typhoon she opens the one door she was never allowed to open, finds a silver pocket watch in an old leather trunk, and steps out of her storeroom into a fog in London, 1895.

The man at the top of the seventeen steps has no cases, no clients and no patience. Sam has a jade dragon that vanished from a locked shop while four cameras watched. Together they have until the last tram to work out how a machine can steal — and why a good man would teach it to.

The watch only opens onto cases nobody ever solved. And it will not take her home until this one is closed.

Book One of THE WATSON WATCH — twelve blank pages, one silver lid. Each book closes one impossible case and etches one symbol inside the watch. Readers fill the lid with Sam.

For readers 9–12 who love City Spies, Enola Holmes and The City of Ember. Short chapters, sixteen black-and-white illustrations, a map of where the watch has been, and a "What Was Real" section separating Hong Kong history from invention. Written in clear English for readers everywhere, including those reading English as a second language.