Hobtown Mystery Stories Vol. 1: The Case Of The Missing Men — Kris Bertin

Welcome to Hobtown, a charmingly bleak village (Population: 2,006) in the hinterlands of Nova Scotia, 1996. It's an easy place to get bored or depressed, if you don't make your own fun. Hobtown Regional High's top girl Dana Nance runs The Teen Detective Club -- a registered after school program -- who make it their business to investigate each and every one of their town's bizarre occurrences. Their small world of missing pets and shed-fires is turned upside down when real-life kid adventurer and globetrotter Sam Finch comes to town and enlists them in their first real case -- the search for his missing father. 

Something strange is going on, and no one in Hobtown will talk about it. It turns out Sam's dad is the sixth man to go missing this year. In the course of the teens' investigations, their seemingly innocuous home town explodes into a terrifying world of pagan secret societies, psychic assaults, possible “wee man” sightings, and homebrew behavior modifications gone horribly wrong. The rot runs deep in Hobtown, and it's up to the teen detectives and associates to stay alive long enough to crack The Case Of The Missing Men!

Childhood friends Kris Bertin and Alexander Forbes have built a truly unique and discrete universe in Hobtown -- an exploration of Nova Scotian identity, drawing from the world of pulp, filtered through a lens of esoteric spirituality, skewed genre tropes, deft character work, and an incredible eye for detail.