When twelve-year-old Eric's parents are deployed to Iraq, he goes to live with grandparents he hardly knows in a small town in North Dakota, but his grandfather's hostility and the threat of losing the dog he has rescued are too much, and Eric runs away.

While coping with his parents' separation, eleven-year-old Skeet spends most of Spring Break in his skiff on a Florida river, where he finds a manatee shot to death and begins looking for the killer.

Hindered by a fight with her friend Dub and a series of mysterious fires, eleven-year-old Allie investigates the fire seventeen years earlier which claimed the lives of the husband and infant son of a school cafeteria worker, as well as the handsome young man whose ghost asks Allie for help.

In the mid-1800s, twelve-year-old Nathan journeys from his farm on the Ohio frontier to Western Pennsylvania to rescue a friend held captive by the owners of a freak show.

Twelve-year-old Ben must cope with the loss of his father, who died the year before, and his mother's overprotectiveness when he enters the annual Striped Bass Derby on Martha's Vineyard.