Johannesburg, 1940. Daphne puts a face to CJ Barnard — the man with two watches. One on each wrist. Always visible.
Johannesburg, 1940. The trail from Shannon leads Daphne to Turffontein Racecourse and the Rand Club — and for the first time she puts a face to CJ Barnard, the man with two watches. One on each wrist. Always visible.
The complete map. The Welsh word DuGall. A handmade canary waiting in a Johannesburg hotel bar for twelve years.
The trail from Shannon leads Daphne to Johannesburg — to Turffontein Racecourse, to the marble corridors of the Rand Club, and finally to a face: CJ Barnard, the man her father once knew, now wearing two watches, one on each wrist, always visible. Daphne has seen that detail before, in ST's own handwriting. It means something — she just doesn't know what yet.
What she finds in Johannesburg is more than a face. A complete map — the missing half of the one from the tin trunk. A single Welsh word, DuGall, written somewhere it has no right to be. And in the back room of a Johannesburg hotel bar, a handmade canary that has sat untouched for twelve years, exactly as ST left it.
Every new discovery goes straight into Daphne's Clue Keeper, and every chapter ends with a What Would YOU Do? question — because CJ Barnard might be part of the network ST built before he vanished, or he might be the reason ST never came home, and the reader has to decide which clues to trust.
Book 2 moves the story from the farms of the Orange Free State into the racecourses, clubs and hotel bars of 1940s Johannesburg — proof that ST's trail didn't end at Shannon, and that some of his secrets have been sitting in plain sight in the city for over a decade.
The Man With Two Watches picks up directly where Start Where The Horses Ran leaves off, moving the family's clue-driven adventure from the quiet farms of the Orange Free State into 1940s Johannesburg. It's written for the same family read-aloud audience — children from around age 8 and the adults reading alongside them, with no clue revealed to one before the other. Families already following the trail from Book 1 will recognise familiar names returning with new meaning; new readers will find enough recap in the opening pages to follow CJ Barnard's story on its own. Like the rest of the series, it suits readers drawn to children's mystery series based on a true story, with real South African settings and a real unsolved family question.
The Hughes Chronicles is based on a true family story. ST Hughes was real. Daphne was real. The trail is real. The locations are rooted in real history. Where the story needed wings to fly — it was given them. The mystery at its heart has never been solved.
Continues from Book 1 — Start Where The Horses Ran · Leads directly into Book 3 — The Bloemfontein Letters →
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