After being told that his father was an assassin for a criminal organization, fourteen-year-old Alex goes to Italy to find out more and becomes involved in a plan to kill thousands of English schoolchildren.

When a professional hockey player comes to Greenfield with plans to build an ice skating rink, the Alden children suspect that someone in town wants to stop the project.

Henry, Jessie, Violet, and Benny--four children who used to live alone in a boxcar and now reside with their grandfather--arrive at Camp Seagull overflowing with excitement, but they soon realize that some of the other campers are not above cheating in the annual camp Olympics.

When the Alden children help the curator of the Greenfield Museum set up a traveling exhibit of ancient Egyptian artifacts, the display seems to be undergoing a run of bad luck and the children wonder whether it might be under a curse.

Lionel Essrog, a.k.a. the Human Freakshow, is a victim of Tourette's syndrome (an uncontrollable urge to shout out nonsense, touch every surface in reach and stroke people. Local tough guy hires Lionel and other boys and grooms them to become the Minna Men, a detective-agency-cum-limo service. All of the Lethem touches that have thrilled critics are here--crackling dialogue, sly humor, dizzying plot twists--but they're secondary to wonderfully full,...

"London, 1887. As the city prepares to celebrate Queen Victoria's golden jubilee, Veronica Speedwell is marking a milestone of her own. After burying her spinster aunt, the orphaned Veronica is free to resume her world travels in pursuit of scientific inquiry-and the occasional romantic dalliance. As familiar with hunting butterflies as she is fending off admirers, Veronica wields her butterfly net and a sharpened hatpin with equal aplomb, and with...

Ian McEwan is known to skirt the edge with his writing; the fringes of society, to test the limits of what we can handle perhaps in our worlds as we bring his writing home with us and allow a whole new being to enter. So it is with The Cement Garden, the story of dying family who live in a dying part of the city. The father of four children decides, in an effort to make his garden easier to control, to pave it over. In the process, he has a heart...

The Aldens help out at a medieval fair and try to find a valuable sword which has been stolen from the fair.

The Aldens accompany their grandfather to his class reunion and investigate the possibility of a buried Civil War treasure, and of a ghost in the bell tower, at Goldwin University.

At the Iron Mountain Home for Boys, there was nothing but time. Time to burn and time to kill, time for two young orphans to learn that life isn't won without a fight. Julian survives only because his older brother, Michael, is fearless and fiercely protective. When tensions boil over and a boy is brutally killed, there is only one sacrifice left for Michael to make: He flees the orphanage and takes the blame with him. For two decades, Michael has...