The Pennywhistle Workshop

A brass crow lands on Willa Pennywhistle's windowsill at quarter to three in the morning, carrying a message that rewrites everything: her Tante Maren, the most brilliant and most secretive automaton maker of her age, has vanished. Willa inherits not just her aunt's shadowed reputation but a hidden workshop full of unfinished automatons, half-remembered formulas, and journals that hint at something far more dangerous than clockwork craft. In a city where gears turn beneath the cobblestones and the powerful would rather keep the past buried, Willa soon discovers that Tante Maren's disappearance was no accident. Lord Cassius Plimsoll has long coveted the Pennywhistle secrets, and Madame Cordelia Vex, an adversary as elegant as she is ruthless, has already begun to move. Guided only by her aunt's voice preserved in memory-playback devices and cryptic notebook entries, Willa must finish what Maren started before those who silenced her aunt silence her too. But every automaton Willa winds seems to carry a fragment of her family's past, and a warning she does not yet understand. To claim her inheritance, she must trust unsteady apprentice hands, forge uneasy alliances with figures like the sharp-eyed Pearl Gossamer and the grizzled Hobnail Tinkersworth, and decide whether the Pennywhistle legacy is worth more than her life.