Okay, this is how it works:

There aren't really 24 hours in the day, there are 25. Got that? The extra one is rolled up too tight to see, and it flashes past most people in an instant. "Most people" means boring, normal, daylight people. But people born exactly at the instant of midnight (all together now: "midnighters") get to walk around while the rest of you suckers are frozen.

So check your birth certificate. If you were born at the stroke of midnight, you might be one of us. By the way, this is real midnight, not lame-time-zone- or daylight-savings-time-adusted midnight. Every spot on earth has its own exact moment when the sun is right under our feet. Suffice it to say that if you were born anytime between about 11:30PM and 1:30AM, you could be a midnighter.

Also, the secret hour doesn't seem to happen everywhere. Bixby is the only place that time freezes, as far as we know. Anyone out there notice something similiar? Email me.

Oh, and one more thing . . . midnight isn't empty. There are slithers, which are sort of like snakes (except they fly, sometimes) and darklings, which are pretty much any shape they want to be--as long as it's a big and scary shape. That's one thing you'll definitely notice about midnight: being number two on the food chain is a big change from being on top.

Nobody is safe in the secret hour.

Strange things happen at midnight in the town of Bixby, Oklahoma.

Time freezes.

Nobody moves.

For one secret hour each night, the town belongs to the dark creatures that haunt the shadows. Only a small group of people know about the secret hour — only they are free to move about the midnight time.

These people call themselves Midnighters. Each one has a different power that is strongest at midnight: Seer, Mindcaster, Acrobat, Polymath. For years the Midnighters and the dark creatures have shared the secret hour, uneasily avoiding one another. All that changes when the new girl with an unmistakable midnight aura appears at Bixby High School.

Jessica Day is not an outsider like the other Midnighters. She acts perfectly normal in every way. But it soon becomes clear that the dark creatures sense a hidden power in Jessica . . . and they're determined to stop her before she can use it.