Heartland Heroes (Flyoverland Series Book 1)

A Small Town. A Summer of Secrets. A Friendship Put to the Test.

In the summer of 1966, thirteen-year-olds Max Scanlan and Charlie Scerbiak are looking forward to ball games, bike rides, and sun-drenched afternoons in their quiet Minnesota town. But when a suspicious death rattles the community, their carefree world shifts overnight.

While the townspeople and police settle on a suspect, Max and Charlie aren’t so sure. What begins as innocent curiosity soon becomes a dangerous pursuit of truth as the boys dig into secrets no one wants uncovered. With each step deeper into the mystery, the risks grow—and so does their resolve.

Heartland Heroes by Mark Reps is a nostalgic coming-of-age mystery about loyalty, courage, and the summer that changed everything.

Get your copy of Heartland Heroes and uncover the truth alongside Max and Charlie.

Excerpt from the book

Chapter 1

KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCK—KNOCK, KNOCK—KNOCK. I rapped out the clichéd one, two, three, three, two, one pattern on the wooden frame of the front screen door of Charlie’s house. The pine wood of the front door sang in response to my knuckles. I wasn’t about to burn any more daylight than was absolutely necessary on the first day of summer vacation. It was time to get rolling. It was time to play ball. It was time to ride bikes. It was time to see what was happenin’.

Charlie had probably slept right through the chirp of baby robins, the rising warmth of the morning sun, and even the wafting smell of coffee percolating on his parents’ new Maytag gas stove. When he didn’t shout down from his bedroom, I gave a second, more dramatic rap on the door. Sort of a bump-ba-da-dum-dum. Dum-dum.

I imagined Charlie lying in bed, opening his grit-filled eyes to the peeling, yellowed wallpaper that drooped in the corner of his bedroom. I had done my best to wake him from a distance by roaring through the neighborhood on my Hiawatha Starfire bicycle. I used Topps baseball cards clamped tightly with clothespins through the tires’ spokes to create the perfect noise. Corvette muffler meets rock and roll guitar is what Charlie called it. He accused me of having a serious ongoing fantasy about a buxom movie star—either Raquel Welch or Marilyn Monroe—rolling into town and being so duly impressed by the sound that she’d beg me for a ride. I think it was more his fantasy than mine, but it worked for me too. I spent my days working on style and imagination. The old-timers around town called me a dreamer. I took it as a compliment.

Standing and waiting at the front door, I could hear Charlie mumbling through his open, second-story bedroom window.

“Doggone it all! Crap.”

Charlie was just being Charlie. And, if this day was like every other, he was cussing himself out for not having untied the ever-present knots in his shoelaces before having gone to bed. At night, his shoes were dripping wet from dew that glistened from every blade of grass we traipsed through playing moonlight tag, capture the flag, or some other night game. They were also most certainly caked with the ever-present reddish-brown iron ore dust that clung to everything in our hometown. Charlie’s shoes always smelled like an infected dishrag that had been used to sop up sour milk. Try as I might, I could never teach him about the importance of proper shoe maintenance.

“Hey, Charleston,” I shouted. “Let’s get going or we’ll miss the big show.”

He caught my reference like it was an easy pop fly.

“Hold your horses. It’s only spring training. It ain’t the World Series. That’s in October,” he shouted through his bedroom window.

“You think I don’t know when the World Series is, doofus?”

“I’m trying to get my shoes on. And, yes, I thought you might have forgotten.”

I chuckled loudly and on purpose.

“Error’s on you, hotshot. You should learn to untie ‘em at night, dunderhead.”

He pushed open the screened window and cupped his hands around his mouth. He lowered his voice so his mother wouldn’t hear his wisecrack.