Mysteries through History Series

As the Civil War draws to a close, a young Virginia girl grieving over the death of her brother meets a Confederate deserter As the Civil War rages nearby, Cassie Willis and her family struggle to scrape a living from their small Virginia farm, while Cassie’s father and beloved brother, Jacob, are away fighting with the Confederate army. When a letter arrives with the news that Jacob has been killed, Cassie and her dog, Hector, immediately go to the secret hiding place Cassie and Jacob shared—a thicket deep in the piney woods. But when she finds the remains of a campsite, she realizes that someone has been living in their special place. Suddenly afraid, Cassie tries to flee, but runs smack into a Confederate deserter. With Hector’s help, she escapes. But she can’t forget the man’s crazed eyes—or the way he threatened her.   Soon, Cassie begins to have the strange feeling that she’s being watched—and then things start disappearing from the farm. Has the deserter returned to make good on his warnings, or is someone else lurking in the woods, waiting to harm Cassie and her family?   This ebook includes a historical afterword.

A twelve-year-old aspiring performer follows her dream in a novel that culminates at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair Orphelia Bruce lives in rural Missouri, the corner where Illinois, Iowa, and her home state come together. She can sing and play the piano better than anyone in Lewis County. So when Orphelia’s mother forbids her from taking part in a traveling minstrel show looking for new talent and starring her idol, Madame Meritta, she runs away to join their troupe.   But life on the road isn’t what she expected. She misses her family, even her annoying older sister, Pearl—Momma’s favorite. And it’s not nearly as glamorous as Orphelia imagined. The group performs in a different town every night, which means long hours of travel. Despite her fame, Madame Meritta still has to work hard to keep her band fed and clothed. But performing at the St. Louis World’s Fair could be Orphelia’s big chance. When a long-buried secret changes everything she thought she knew about her family, will she still get to live her dream? This ebook includes a historical afterword. 

At the outbreak of World War II, a twelve-year-old girl comes up with an idea to help the war effort America has just entered World War II, and everyone in Charlotte Campbell’s family is doing his or her part, either abroad or in the Pennsylvania factory town where the Campbells live. Charlotte’s brother Jim has enlisted in the navy, and her mother works in Braddock’s local war plant. Her dad guides tugboats filled with supplies up the Monongahela River. Eager to contribute to the war effort—besides saving to buy defense stamps—Charlotte organizes a scrap metal drive like the ones all over the country. She and her sixth-grade classmates start collecting old junk and soon have so much that they have to store it in the school basement . . . until someone steals all the metal.   Charlotte is determined to find the thief and get back the precious scraps. Her younger brother Robbie supplies a list of potential suspects, from the school janitor to a fellow fourth grader. Some of the kids think it might be Charlotte’s German friend Betsy. But when they set a trap for the culprit, Charlotte has to face the fear that’s been giving her nightmares since childhood.   This ebook includes a historical afterword. 

Set in 1860 as the first wagon trains rumble into the American West, this adventure-filled novel centers on a frontier girl and the beloved pony she tries to save Born in the back of a covered wagon traveling west from Vermont, Annie Dawson dreams of someday seeing what’s on the eastern side of the great Mississippi. For now, she’ll have to be content living with her parents and younger brother in the Nebraska Territory at the Red Buttes Pony Express station run by her family.   That is, until her favorite pony starts going wild, and Annie’s friend—Pony Express rider Billy Cody—suspects that someone is poisoning her. But who’d want to hurt gentle Magpie? Indian tribes stirring up trouble? Or the Butterfield Mail, the Pony Express rival that seems to feel threatened by the ponies’ speed in delivering mail to California?   The night before Magpie is scheduled to be put down, Annie steals out to see if her half-Shoshone friend Redbird Wilson can cure Magpie’s mysterious ailment. But the pony just gets worse. Unsure whom she can trust, Annie must use her wits to find the culprit before Magpie dies and other horses meet the same fate.   This ebook includes a historical afterword. 

As war rages in Europe, an eleven-year-old girl is swept into the New York suffragist movement Eleven-year-old Susan O’Neal is sick of always having to look after her two younger sisters. But ever since their father died, her mother depends on her. To make ends meet, she’s just taken a boarder, an Englishwoman named Beatrice Rutherford, into their Chelsea tenement apartment. Susan and Bea become fast friends, but when Susan finds a folded piece of paper with six cryptic words—must be kept secret for now—she wonders what her new friend is hiding.   Is Bea a spy? Is she trying to involve Susan’s mother in something dangerous? Susan’s fear becomes a reality when her mother vanishes on the day five thousand women from every state in the Union come to New York for a suffrage rally. A riot erupts, and Susan knows something truly momentous has happened. Terrified for her mother’s safety, she begins a search that exposes some hard truths about her city—and their new boarder.   This ebook includes a historical afterword. 

Gold fever sweeps the country as a twelve-year-old aspiring writer travels to the Yukon with her family and best friend, fighting natural disasters and a clever thief After traveling from San Francisco by steam ship, Hetty McKinley, her best friend, Alma, and their families prepare for the five-hundred-mile trek north to the gold fields of the Yukon. It’s only September, but the Arctic Circle is already frigid.   As the two families, along with hundreds of other prospectors, camp out for the night near the outpost of Dyea, Hetty catches a glimpse of the legendary Chilkoot Pass, the narrow gap through which they’ll cross Alaska into Canada. But the next morning, Alma’s mother discovers that all their money is gone! A few days later, Hetty’s cherished locket, containing a photograph of her dead mother, disappears.   More thefts soon follow, but these are the least of their problems. Soon, the group is battling typhoid, blizzards, and a terrifying avalanche. Will Hetty and her family and friends survive their journey to the top of the world?   This ebook includes a historical afterword. 

An Agatha Award nominee for Best Children’s/Young Adult Mystery and a WILLA Award finalist for Best Children’s/Young Adult Book: In 1867, a twelve-year-old girl faces danger and disaster when she moves to the Colorado Territory with her widowed mother, who is hoping to start a newspaper Emma Henderson’s mother has changed since her father died fighting in the Civil War. First, she starts wearing an embarrassing bloomer costume—trousers under a short skirt. Then, she forces Emma to move to the far-off Colorado Territory so she can be editor of a newspaper! When Emma hears someone whistling her father’s favorite tune as they prepare to leave Chicago, she knows it’s a bad omen.   The hardscrabble mining town of Twin Pines is very different from Emma’s former home in the city. Instead of having a house of their own, she and her mother must live in a boarding house. Worst of all, it’s clear from the moment they step off the stagecoach that someone doesn’t want them there. A troublemaker tries hard to sabotage the newspaper, and Emma continues to hear eerie whistling in the night. Is it the ghost of her father? With the help of her new friend Jeremy, Emma sets out to solve two baffling mysteries.   This ebook includes a historical afterword. 

An eleven-year-old immigrant must clear her name when things start disappearing from a Boston settlement house Innocenza Moretti’s parents died in a fire when she was two. Ever since, she’s lived with her grandmother and seven lodgers in the flat downstairs from her aunt, uncle, and cousins in a crowded tenement in Boston’s North End. Innie’s world changes when she and her cousin Teresa become members of a settlement house where immigrant girls can learn more about American life. Best of all, they’ll get to participate in a library club. At school, Innie has to share books with two or three other girls. Having her own books would be like eating Sunday dinner every day. The girls’ first assignment at the settlement house is unpacking books that had to be moved because of the recent fire that tore through the city. But now valuable things are vanishing: a pottery mug. A silver teapot. Money. And the prime suspect is Innie!   With the help of Teresa and their new friend Matela Rosen, Innie searches for the real culprit. A secret tunnel under Copp’s Hill Burying Ground leads them to a surprising thief.   This ebook includes a historical afterword. 

The Kansas prairie in 1878 is the setting for this mystery about a girl who gets a new stepmother—a woman who may not be what she appears Ida Kate Deming lives on the Kansas prairie with her father. Once a lonely outpost, Hays City is now a bustling town where the twelve-year-old impatiently awaits the arrival of papa’s mail-order bride. Ida Kate lost her beloved mother when she was ten. Now someone new will share their lives, along with the seemingly endless chores. And the best part is, Ida Kate will have a new mother and a new little brother, as well. But when Caroline Fairchild steps off the train, she doesn’t look at all the way she described herself in her letters. Instead of being tall and thin, she’s short. And her hair is the wrong color. And she definitely isn’t allergic to cats.   As Ida Kate races to uncover the truth before her father marries Caroline, a blizzard endangers her new family, and Ida Kate has to figure out where her true loyalties lie.   This ebook includes a historical afterword. 

A young girl’s life changes forever when she investigates a mystery with the help of writers, artists, and musicians in 1920s Harlem Bessie Coulter has no idea why her father spirits her and her brother, Eddie, away from their home in Burlington, North Carolina, in the middle of the night, leaving their sick mother behind. But from the moment she steps off the train at Grand Central Station, she’s captivated by this teeming, colorful city that’s both scary and exciting.   Although Harlem is a thrilling place, Bessie misses her mother and can’t get used to living with her two aunts. She’s lonely and homesick, especially when her father begins going out with a beautiful, well-dressed woman. Desperate to find out what’s going on, Bessie launches an investigation that takes Eddie and her into a world of artists, jazz musicians, and writers, in search of a strange place called the Dark Tower. With the help of their next-door neighbor Lillian Moore and a Caribbean hoodoo woman named Miss Flo, Bessie is determined to uncover the mystery and get her family back together.    This ebook includes a historical afterword. 

A twelve-year-old girl searches for answers when she finds an abandoned baby in the aftermath of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 Clara Curfman is awakened from a recurring swimming dream by her big, furry sheepdog, Humphrey. Suddenly, her bed is moving and the room is shaking from side to side and up and down. The floor starts pitching like a giant ocean wave, and her books dance right off the shelves. As her parents and their neighbors cope with the earthquake’s devastating aftereffects, Clara makes a stunning discovery: A baby has been left on the doorstep of her family’s boarding house.   Is the abandoned infant a victim of the earthquake—or something more sinister? The only clue to her identity is a silver rattle engraved with the letter H. On a quest to find Baby H’s parents, Clara meets a boy named Edgar who has been orphaned by the earthquake. Their search takes them on a winding trail of danger that will test the true limits of Clara’s courage.   This ebook includes a historical afterword. 

Nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Young Adult Mystery: In 1732, a twelve-year-old girl of Ojibwe and French heritage must clear her father of a stealing charge—or risk being separated from him forever Suzette Choudoir always looks forward to summer, when her family leaves the Ojibwe people’s winter camp and returns to the summer gathering place on La Pointe Island. This year her papa, a French fur trader, hopes to win a trappers’ competition. If he does, he can remain with his family year-round, instead of paddling away to far-off Montreal in autumn. When someone steals a bale of valuable furs, however, suspicion falls on Papa. Determined to find the real thief, Suzette gathers clues and tries to track down the missing furs. But it will take all of her courage to clear her father’s name. If she can’t, her family will be forced to leave La Pointe Island in disgrace, and Suzette—a black-haired, blue-eyed girl of mixed cultural heritage—may never find a true home.   This ebook includes a historical afterword.

In 1958, a girl risks everything to put a stop to a deadly Ku Klux Klan plot to bomb her Tennessee school The middle child in a family of eight, Mendy Anna Thompson was named after her grandmother’s hero—former first lady Anna Eleanor Roosevelt. Playing in the woods near her house in Monteagle, Tennessee, with Mr. Hare, her tamed wild rabbit, Mendy likes to imagine traveling around the world with Mrs. Roosevelt. But Mr. Hare is no substitute for Mendy’s best friend, Jeffrey, whom her parents have forbidden her to see because she’s black and he’s white.   But one night, Mendy notices evidence of trespassers in the secret clearing behind her house. When she sets out to investigate, she uncovers a plot to bomb her high school during a visit by Eleanor Roosevelt! Now Mendy and Jeffrey, who meet in secret, must find a way to foil the Ku Klux Klan before they succeed in their wicked scheme.   Based on true events, Circle of Fire is a moving and suspenseful story of friendship and race relations in the segregated South.   This ebook includes a historical afterword. 

Winner of the Edgar Award: When her homing pigeons disappear while her father is fighting in World War I, a twelve-year-old girl suspects a German spy may be responsible With her father in France, fighting in the war, Pam Lowder has the responsibility of taking care of the family’s prize-winning homing pigeons on their farm. The birds are special because her father trained them to fly at night so they can bring messages to his family when he’s not there. And now a stranger with a foreign accent has shown up in Currituck with an offer to buy the whole lot.   But Pam isn’t interested in selling. She loves the pigeons and would much rather spend time with them than go to school. Then she wakes up one morning to find some pigeons missing. After the disappearance of Caspian, her favorite, the plucky pigeoneer sets a plan in motion to catch the thief. She has a pretty good idea who it is. But how is she supposed to rescue her pigeons and outwit a German spy?   This ebook includes a historical afterword.

In 1724, Rachel Howell leaves New York for South Carolina . . . and plunges into a dangerous world of pirates and hidden treasure that threatens her family’s future When New York–born and –raised Rachel Howell sails for South Carolina to be reunited with her father, the last thing she expects is to be attacked by pirates! She’s lucky to escape with her life, but the attackers take a pearl necklace belonging to her dead mother. Things go from bad to worse when Rachel arrives safely in Charles Town and learns her father is getting married again. The one bright spot is her friendship with Sally Pugh, the daughter of the local tavern owner. Until Papa’s bride-to-be arrives . . . and forbids Rachel from seeing Sally.   Determined to remain friends, Rachel and Sally search for a secret place to meet. They discover a hidden island in the Charles Town port, containing a sinkhole filled with quicksand, rocks with mysterious markings, . . . and a human skull. But when the girls are stranded overnight and overhear men in a hidden lagoon, they realize they’ve stumbled onto something big. It could destroy Rachel’s father’s business . . . and Rachel’s life.   This ebook includes a historical afterword.

Gold fever sweeps the country as a twelve-year-old aspiring writer travels to the Yukon with her family and best friend, fighting natural disasters and a clever thief After traveling from San Francisco by steam ship, Hetty McKinley, her best friend, Alma, and their families prepare for the five-hundred-mile trek north to the gold fields of the Yukon. It’s only September, but the Arctic Circle is already frigid.   As the two families, along with hundreds of other prospectors, camp out for the night near the outpost of Dyea, Hetty catches a glimpse of the legendary Chilkoot Pass, the narrow gap through which they’ll cross Alaska into Canada. But the next morning, Alma’s mother discovers that all their money is gone! A few days later, Hetty’s cherished locket, containing a photograph of her dead mother, disappears.   More thefts soon follow, but these are the least of their problems. Soon, the group is battling typhoid, blizzards, and a terrifying avalanche. Will Hetty and her family and friends survive their journey to the top of the world?   This ebook includes a historical afterword. 

On an island off the coast of Virginia, the daughter of a US Lifesaver investigates a series of suspicious shipwrecks It’s 1895. Rhoda Midyette lives on Glenn Island, where her father is keeper of the US Lifesaving Station. He leads rescue operations whenever a ship hits the dangerous shoals around the island—which has happened far too often lately. One stormy night, when Rhoda and her father’s team help the survivors off their destroyed boat, she spies a mysterious light on the cape above Graveyard Shoal. The next day, she finds footprints in the sand. Is someone deliberately causing the collisions? Swaying their lanterns so the sailors will navigate toward the perilous shallows instead of away from them? Or is it a ghost light—and are the footprints those of the mythical mangled mariner?   As she digs deeper, Rhoda uncovers clues that threaten everything she knows. With so much at stake—including her best-friendship with the gravely ill Pearl—Rhoda has to trust in herself and find a way to save lives.   This ebook includes a historical afterword.

Winner of the Edgar Award: When her homing pigeons disappear while her father is fighting in World War I, a twelve-year-old girl suspects a German spy may be responsible With her father in France, fighting in the war, Pam Lowder has the responsibility of taking care of the family’s prize-winning homing pigeons on their farm. The birds are special because her father trained them to fly at night so they can bring messages to his family when he’s not there. And now a stranger with a foreign accent has shown up in Currituck with an offer to buy the whole lot.   But Pam isn’t interested in selling. She loves the pigeons and would much rather spend time with them than go to school. Then she wakes up one morning to find some pigeons missing. After the disappearance of Caspian, her favorite, the plucky pigeoneer sets a plan in motion to catch the thief. She has a pretty good idea who it is. But how is she supposed to rescue her pigeons and outwit a German spy?   This ebook includes a historical afterword.

An eleven-year-old immigrant must clear her name when things start disappearing from a Boston settlement house Innocenza Moretti’s parents died in a fire when she was two. Ever since, she’s lived with her grandmother and seven lodgers in the flat downstairs from her aunt, uncle, and cousins in a crowded tenement in Boston’s North End. Innie’s world changes when she and her cousin Teresa become members of a settlement house where immigrant girls can learn more about American life. Best of all, they’ll get to participate in a library club. At school, Innie has to share books with two or three other girls. Having her own books would be like eating Sunday dinner every day. The girls’ first assignment at the settlement house is unpacking books that had to be moved because of the recent fire that tore through the city. But now valuable things are vanishing: a pottery mug. A silver teapot. Money. And the prime suspect is Innie!   With the help of Teresa and their new friend Matela Rosen, Innie searches for the real culprit. A secret tunnel under Copp’s Hill Burying Ground leads them to a surprising thief.   This ebook includes a historical afterword. 

Nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Young Adult Mystery: In 1732, a twelve-year-old girl of Ojibwe and French heritage must clear her father of a stealing charge—or risk being separated from him forever Suzette Choudoir always looks forward to summer, when her family leaves the Ojibwe people’s winter camp and returns to the summer gathering place on La Pointe Island. This year her papa, a French fur trader, hopes to win a trappers’ competition. If he does, he can remain with his family year-round, instead of paddling away to far-off Montreal in autumn. When someone steals a bale of valuable furs, however, suspicion falls on Papa. Determined to find the real thief, Suzette gathers clues and tries to track down the missing furs. But it will take all of her courage to clear her father’s name. If she can’t, her family will be forced to leave La Pointe Island in disgrace, and Suzette—a black-haired, blue-eyed girl of mixed cultural heritage—may never find a true home.   This ebook includes a historical afterword.

A twelve-year-old aspiring performer follows her dream in a novel that culminates at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair Orphelia Bruce lives in rural Missouri, the corner where Illinois, Iowa, and her home state come together. She can sing and play the piano better than anyone in Lewis County. So when Orphelia’s mother forbids her from taking part in a traveling minstrel show looking for new talent and starring her idol, Madame Meritta, she runs away to join their troupe.   But life on the road isn’t what she expected. She misses her family, even her annoying older sister, Pearl—Momma’s favorite. And it’s not nearly as glamorous as Orphelia imagined. The group performs in a different town every night, which means long hours of travel. Despite her fame, Madame Meritta still has to work hard to keep her band fed and clothed. But performing at the St. Louis World’s Fair could be Orphelia’s big chance. When a long-buried secret changes everything she thought she knew about her family, will she still get to live her dream? This ebook includes a historical afterword.