Nancy Drew tries to find a clue to the strange tapping sounds in the house of a retired actress.

The Hardy boys become involved in two mysteries when they attempt to track down a jewel thief and solve the intrigue surrounding an old estate.

A rare Chinese vase is stolen from a pottery shop. Nancy and the owner of the shop feel that locating "the leaning chimney" will provide the clue to the vase and other stolen articles.

Wilma Tenderfoot, a ten-year-old orphan who lives at Cooper Island's Lowside Institute for Woeful Children, dreams of escape and of becoming the apprentice of the world-famous detective Theodore P. Goodman, whose every case she follows devotedly in the newspaper.

Their search for an Easter Island idol takes the Hardy boys to Easter Island and on to investigate the theft of government material in Antarctica.

In 1923, when New Orleans native and orphan Bobby Lee Claremont boards a train to Chicago, where he hopes to join the criminal element and make a new life for himself, far away from the heavy-handed salvation of the Sisters of Charitable Mercy, he acquaints himself with a group of intriguing and possibly dangerous passengers who cause Bobby Lee to reconsider his plans.