The Billionaire’s Curse (26 page)
Read The Billionaire’s Curse Online
Authors: Richard Newsome
Thanks first, and most importantly, to my family—Kathryn, Sam, Ruby, and Ella (and Pippin the cat)—for giving up holidays and agreeing to up stumps and move city so this book could finally be completed.
To three people who deployed the right words at the right time: Ali Lavau (who was there at the very beginning), Colleen Lewis von Eckartsberg, and Frank Leggett.
To my parents, Phil and Dorothy, and my sister, Nicola, who all taught me the value of perseverance.
And, finally, to everyone at the Text Publishing Company—in particular Michael Heyward, Jane Pearson, Penny Hueston, Anne Beilby, Bridie Riordan, and Kirsty Wilson.
RICHARD NEWSOME
makes his debut with this novel, which won Text Publishing’s inaugural Young Adult Writing Prize. The book started out as a bedtime story for his children, and he finally set it to paper over the course of ten years. In researching the story, he traveled across England, studying many of the places that appear in the book, and he traveled to India for the second book in the trilogy. He lives in Sherwood, Australia, with his wife and three children. Visit him on the web at www.richardnewsome.com.
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Jacket art © 2010 by Jonny Duddle
Jacket design by Joel Tippie
THE BILLIONAIRE’S CURSE
. Text copyright © 2009 by Richard Newsome. Illustrations copyright © 2010 by Jonny Duddle. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Newsome, Richard.
The billionaire’s curse / Richard Newsome; illustrated by Jonny Duddle
p. cm.
Summary: When thirteen-year-old Gerald finds himself the heir to twenty billion pounds from an aunt he never met, he inherits with it a mystery surrounding his aunt’s death and various artifacts in the British Museum.
ISBN 978-0-06-194490-1
[1. Mystery and detective stories. 2. Inheritance and succession—Fiction. 3. London (England)—Fiction. 4. England—Fiction.] I. Duddle, Jonny, ill. II. Title.
PZ7.N486644Bi 2010 2009042518
[Fic]—dc22 CIP
AC
EPub Edition © March 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-199832-4
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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