Visiting Zion National Park with his family, twelve-year-old Jack encounters two mysteries, the strange behavior of a band of wild mustangs and the possibly sinister actions of his new foster brother, a Shoshone boy.
Jack Landon's sister is held hostage by people asking for Leesa, a fourteen-year-old foster child staying with his family, and they are all led to a missile testing ground in Death Valley National Park, where bighorn sheep have been mysteriously dying.
Through caring for a stray fox cub, a ten-year-old gradually accepts the fact that, though he too has been abandoned, he does have a place in his foster family.
While lost in a tunnel at Carlsbad Cavern, thirteen-year-old Jack, eleven-year-old Ashley, and their eight-year-old foster brother, Sam, think bats and darkness are their worst problems, until they stumble across thieves.
Sixteen-year-old Darcy Jones knows little about her past except that she was abandoned outside a Chicago firehouse at age five, but when the mysterious Conn arrives at her high school she begins to discover things about her past that she is not sure she likes.
When Cathy decides to carpool from Norwalk to Greenwich, Connecticut, to study Latin in summer school, she does not expect the shocking events that occurred five years earlier to come flooding back into her relatively settled life.
When Mark first becomes the foster child of restaurant owners, he thinks they just want free help, but when he is wrongfully accused of trying to sabotage the business he is determined to find the true culprit.
