swindlers and swindling

While celebrating his eleventh birthday with his mother and his friend Olga, Klooz relates the case that started his detective career, which involved magic balls, and a boy named Snake who was his best friend.

"The eventually internationally recognized writer Lily Blennerhassett" spends her thirteenth summer missing her best friend and keeping a journal of her boring life at home and exciting newly-discovered relatives.

When an old lady swindles him out of his magic dreidels, Jacob tries to get them back in time for the family's Hanukkah celebration.

Suspecting that their friend has been swindled, the Hardy brothers investigate and find themselves on the trail of a much larger criminal operation.

Photographer Horace Carpetine is commissioned to do a portrait for society matron Mrs. Frederick Von Macht; however, the photos evoke both the image and the ghost of the Von Macht's dead daughter, Eleanora, who has returned to seek vengence on those who killed her.

After unscrupulous collector S. Wendell Palamino cons him out of a valuable baseball card, sixth-grader Griffin Bing puts together a band of misfits to break into Palomino's heavily guarded store and steal the card back, planning to use the money to finance his father's failing invention, the Smart Pick fruit picker.