Harry Booth started stealing at nine to keep a roof over his ailing mother's head, slipping into luxurious, emptyhomes at night to find items he could trade for precious cash. When his mother finally succumbed to cancer, he left Chicago-but kept up his nightwork. Wandering from the Outer Banks to Savannah to New Orleans, he dons new identities and stays careful, observant, distant. He can't afford to attract attention-or get attached. Still, he can't...

Bruce Cable owns a popular bookstore in the sleepy resort town of Santa Rosa on Camino Island in Florida. He makes his real money, though, as a prominent dealer in rare books. Very few people know that he occasionally dabbles in the black market of stolen books and manuscripts. Mercer Mann is a young novelist with a severe case of writer's block who has recently been laid off from her teaching position. She is approached by an elegant, mysterious...

Set in contemporary Chicago, amid a time of turmoil, tensions build when Veronica, Alice, Linda and Belle take their fate into their own hands and conspire to forge a future on their own terms.

The school skeleton: At Green Lawn Elementary, the entire school becomes involved in a mystery when Mr. Bones, the skeleton in the nurse's office, disappears. The talking T. Rex: Dink, Josh, and Ruth Rose investigate the theft of a great deal of money from the belly of a nearly life-size Tyrannosaurus Rex model that their friend, Jud Wheat, is using to raise money for a dinosaur museum. The unwilling umpire: When the umpire at the baseball game...

"When a desperate princess hires Puss to recover her stolen ruby, he is reluctantly partnered with three little kittens. ... The minute the mittens are off, The Three Diablos wreak havoc on Puss' mission to recover the stolen ruby from the notorious French thief, 'Le Chuchoteur The Whisperer'"--Container.

Dr. Clitterhouse wants to find out what makes a criminal tick. Eager to study the physical and mental states of lawbreakers, he joins a gang of jewel thieves. Rocks Valentine is an ice-blooded tough guy the doc calls "a magnificient speciment of pure viciousness," is part of the gang. Jo Keller is a savvy crime queen the doc hooks up with.

Seventh-grader Steve Brixton finds himself pulled back into sleuthing when, during a train trip down the California coast, he uncovers a mystery involving a fleet of priceless automobiles, an assassin, and a private rail car.