Some clocks tick forward. This one remembers backward.

Fourteen-year-old Eli Grant doesn’t believe in haunted clocks or secret auctions. He just wants to survive another shift at his family’s fading antique business without getting yelled at by his sister or disappointing his grandfather again. But when a strange children’s clock—Lot 27—is sold to a bidder who doesn’t blink, time starts pulling him sideways.

Eli’s sketches change on their own. Time ticks in reverse. And the spirals in his drawings don’t feel like art—they feel like memories trying to escape.

Then he finds the invitation.

Slipped into his sketchbook, the Spiral card drags him into the Shadow Auction, a black-market vault of memory-bound relics and masked collectors. At the center of it all is Seraphine, a too-charming villain with secrets Eli can’t afford to forget—and a very specific interest in the clock he never meant to wind.

If Eli can’t unlock the clock’s past, it may unravel his own.

Fast-paced, cinematic, and full of spiral-bending secrets, The Clock That Tick-Tocked is Book One in the Shadow Auction Series—a YA fantasy-thriller saga about fractured memories, forbidden relics, and the price of unlocking the past.

Perfect for fans of Stranger Things, The Maze Runner, and The Night Circus.