The first three books are up and running! You’ll find custom links to the New Three Investigators series pages on Amazon and Barnes & Noble at the bottom of this post.
CHAPTER 1 SELECTION 1 (BOB)
Bob Andrews glanced at his watch as he drummed his fingers on the glass-topped table. His best friends Pete Crenshaw and Jupiter Jones were probably already at the Jones Salvage Yard, working with the antique letterpress, printing copies of the new Three Investigators business card, while here he was, stuck on the small stone patio in the back yard of his house in Rocky Beach, waiting for his father's blueberry pancakes.
He'd agreed to have breakfast with his parents this morning, but this was taking forever. Come on, Dad, he thought. He loved his parents, but he was in a tearing hurry to join his friends – although, before he did, he'd promised Miss Bennett he'd put in two hours' work at the Rocky Beach Library. He'd been working at the library for years now, and normally he liked being there, but today was the first official day of the new investigative season!
The morning air was fresh and still cool, but every so often Bob thought he caught a whiff of something that smelled like smoke. Through the silvery-gray leaves of eucalyptus, Bob squinted up at the deep blue of a clear California sky. Where was the smoke coming from? he wondered uneasily. California was a tinderbox, even in mid-June, and wildfires had been burning in the north, conflagrations that had roared across thousands of acres – blackening the sky with ash and plumes of smoke. So far the fires hadn't hit southern California.
The day before – the first day of summer vacation, with 8th grade behind them and high school not far ahead – Bob had been talking to Pete and Jupiter about the mysteries The Three Investigators hoped to solve this summer. Jupe had mentioned the fires and Pete had said – half-joking but also half-serious – that maybe there was a pyromaniac on the loose. Someone lighting the fires on purpose.
"No way," Bob had said.
"Don't be so certain, Bob," Jupiter had said. "The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection thinks at least 10% of all fires are deliberately set."
"Who would do a thing like that?" Bob asked.
"Firebugs," Jupiter said, in his calm, reasonable voice. "They may appear relatively normal, but they lack the ability to empathize with other human beings, and they don't respond to punishment."
Jupiter had grown taller and slimmer over the last year, and he had even more information packed into his capacious brain.
"Do you remember the Dixie fire that burned almost 100,000 acres a few years ago?" he went on. "They arrested a former college professor who set a second set of fires behind the firefighters who rushed in to try to contain the first blaze."
"You're kidding," Pete said, an astonished look on his face. "That's totally crazy."
"Correct," Jupiter said. "They are crazy. That's why they call them pyro-maniacs. Most are male; most use matches or lighters; and most act out of boredom. They get an emotional rush from starting the fire. A guy named John Leonard Orr, who was a fire captain and an arson investigator, is suspected of having started over two thousand fires in California."
"A fire captain?" Bob said, amazed.
"An arson investigator?" Pete said, incredulous.
"He liked fires," Jupiter said. "And when he came across one he'd set himself, he could say for sure that it had been arson."
"Jeez," Pete had said. "How do you know all this stuff?"
That was easy, Bob thought. Jupiter was a genius – though he hated it when someone called him that.
"I came across it in my reading," Jupiter said blandly.
CHAPTER 1 SELECTION 2 (BOB)
The library was quiet, and no one was anywhere near the Circulation Desk. To distract himself, Bob logged off the library system and opened his e-mail. Messages came flooding in, most of them junk. But as his eyes slid down the long row of senders, he was thrilled to see that he had a new message from Hector Sebastian. He was about to open it when he was startled by a voice so nasal and irritating it might have been a buzzing wasp.
Bob looked up to see E. Skinner Norris holding a bunch of books. Bob groaned. Skinny Norris was a jerk, plain and simple, and he seemed to spend every day honing his jerkiness. His nickname was perfect; he had a concave chest, arms like broomsticks, bristly blond hair the color of dried summer grass, and a protuberant Adam's apple. He was two years older than Jupiter, Pete, and Bob, and he'd made it his life's work to bother and insult The Three Investigators. Bob knew he was secretly jealous of them – of Jupiter most of all.
"Hello, Skinny," Bob said, looking him up and down. "When did you learn to read?"
"Ha, ha, very funny, Miss Andrews," Skinny said. "I'm just returning these for my mother. I wouldn't be caught dead with a book."
"I bet," Bob said. "And no decent book would be caught dead with you. Keep your voice down. This is a library."
Skinny dropped the books on the counter with a thud, making as much noise as possible.
"So what's up with you and your stupid friends?" Skinny asked. "How's old Jupiter McSherlock?"
Bob thought quickly. Maybe he'd have some fun with Skinny.
"Jupiter?" he said. "Oh, Jupiter's great! Over the last few weeks, his powers have been increasing by the day. Yesterday I saw him move a whole stack of reclaimed lumber with his mind."
Skinny's already narrow eyes narrowed further. He looked impressed but skeptical.
"Maybe he'd better see if he can learn to move the three of you around with that big brain of his," he said. "Last I heard you were about to lose your wheels."
Unfortunately, Skinny was right. Several years ago, Jupiter had used his skill at deduction and analysis to ace a puzzle sponsored by the Rocky Beach Rent-'n'-Ride Auto Rental Company. By winning, he'd secured the use of a vintage Rolls-Royce sedan, complete with an English chauffeur. Through clever logic – and also with help from an English boy who appreciated their assistance in finding an Indian jewel called The Fiery Eye – Jupiter had managed to extend the initial thirty-day prize period again and again.
But now their use of the car had almost come to an end, and how The Three Investigators were going to get from place to place in the future was a mystery the boys were looking forward to solving. Although Bob had no use for Skinny, in one way he envied him a little. Skinny had his own car.
Bob wouldn't much miss the Rolls itself – it was comfortable, but it was also overly big, and gaudy, and so tricked out it was embarrassing – but he would certainly miss – they all would miss – its chauffeur, William Worthington. His reserve was mixed with affability and good humor, and he had helped The Three Investigators out of a lot of tight spots. He was lean, strong, very tall, quick-thinking, good-looking, and kind. All three boys were very fond of him.
"Thanks for your concern," Bob said to Skinny, "but we'll manage. Maybe you could lend us your sports car."
Skinny smirked. "Yeah, right," he said. "Like in a million billion years." He scratched his throat and his Adam's apple bobbed up and down. He picked up a stapler and put it down, then began playing with a paperclip.
"Don't you have somewhere better to be?" Bob asked. "Like preschool?"
"Actually, I'm hiding out," Skinny said, looking around exaggeratedly as though he'd been followed by spies. "I'm supposed to be helping my aunt and her daughter. They've just moved back to Rocky Beach, and my little cousin Mally-Wally isn't happy to be here, at all, at all. My parents want me to keep her company, but she's a total drag."
"Coming from you," Bob said, "that's quite a compliment."
Skinny looked at Bob with a combination of petulance and disgust.
"Well, Miss Andrews," he said. "Great seeing you. Don't let the bedbugs bite." He ran his hand through his hair, turned, and stalked out the door.
CHAPTER 2 SELECTION 1 (PETE)
Pete Crenshaw shook his head in disbelief. For the last twenty minutes he'd been expecting Bob to show up at any moment, and he'd been keeping his eye on Green Gate One - a secret entrance in the fence surrounding the Jones Salvage Yard. It led directly into the outdoor workshop. There, Pete had been working hard on an antique letterpress Jupiter had found among the items brought home one day to the Salvage Yard by his Uncle Titus.
With his uncle's permission, Jupiter had rebuilt it and moved it into the area in front of Headquarters. The outdoor workshop also had a band saw, a lathe, and a drill press - among other useful tools that Jupiter, Pete, and Bob had repaired when they had come in broken, and that they used when the need arose.
Today, though, Pete was the one who was mainly using the letterpress, while Jupiter was mainly sitting, working on a puzzle in a magazine his Uncle Titus had given him. He clearly felt he could do this safely because although the outdoor workshop wasn't quite as invisible to prying eyes as Headquarters was, at least it couldn't be seen from the Salvage Yard office where Jupiter's Aunt Mathilda worked.
Aunt Mathilda was a kind woman, Pete thought, but she had never really taken the firm of The Three Investigators as seriously as The Three Investigators themselves did, and if she saw the boys "just hanging around" as she called it, she always tried to put them to work. Pete didn't care.
In fact, he liked helping out, and especially in The Jones Salvage Yard - a truly fantastic place. After Jupiter had persuaded him to change the name from Jones's Junk Yard, his Uncle Titus had started to collect a lot of unusual items - old doors and signs, antique equipment and machines, leaded glass windows, fireplace mantels, plumbing fixtures, ceramic tiles, interesting old tools - as well as a pipe organ that had figured in The Three Investigators' very first case.
Now the Jones Salvage Yard was full to bursting with Uncle Titus's finds, gathered from all over southern California - some of them quite valuable, and all of them of interest to people looking to reclaim, refurbish, renovate, and rebuild.
Looking at Jupiter working on his puzzle, Pete thought that although Jupiter and his uncle - Jupiter's father's much older half-brother - were in most ways very different, they had in common a fascination with puzzles and riddles and enigmas, and Jupiter thought he should complete any puzzles his uncle gave him. Pete understood this, but even so, he felt that, in this case, Jupiter should be helping print, dry, and stack The Three Investigators' new cards.
The cards said, as they always had:
THE THREE INVESTIGATORS
"We Investigate Anything"
???
First Investigator - Jupiter Jones
Second Investigator - Pete Crenshaw
Records and Research - Bob Andrews
What was different with this new batch was that at the bottom of the card was the number of the landline in Headquarters, the number of Bob Andrews's cellphone, and the brand-new website address of their firm.
Also, on the new cards the boys' names, and the question marks, were in three different colors - red, blue, and green, the colors of the chalk the boys sometimes used to leave secret signals for one another. Although using different colors for different words wouldn't be difficult on a computer, it was much more difficult - but also more substantial - on an old-fashioned printing press.
"Hey, Jupe," Pete finally called out. "These new cards are great! The unbleached card stock really makes the colors pop."
Jupiter looked up from his puzzle and squinted in the morning sunlight. In the last six months, he had grown a lot, and although in the past, he had sometimes looked somewhat stocky - and even pudgy - he was suddenly slimming down and shooting up.
That wasn't surprising, given his age, but what was a little surprising was that his hair, which had always been darker than Pete's, had now turned almost black - a real contrast to his blue-green eyes.
"Thanks, Pete," Jupiter said. "I think they bring the firm up to date."
"I can't imagine where Bob is," Pete said. "Do you know when your uncle's getting back, at least?"
Jupiter glanced at his watch. "It's almost noon," he said, "and Uncle Titus doesn't like to miss lunch. He left just after breakfast, and five hours should be plenty of time for him to check out the yard sales and estate sales he'd lined up. So, I'd expect him soon."
"Boy," Pete said. "I wonder what he'll bring back this time."
CHAPTER 2 SELECTION 2 (PETE)
The old truck pulled in, Uncle Titus waving cheerfully, with the Salvage Yard's two Norwegian carpenters, Leif and Magnus Haldorsson, balancing in the truck bed among the day's finds.
Since the Salvage Yard had a lot of reclaimed lumber for sale, when Hans and Konrad – also brothers, originally from Bavaria – who had worked for Uncle Titus and Aunt Mathilda, driving trucks and hauling heavy goods around, had both gotten married and started new jobs, Aunt Mathilda had had the idea to hire replacements who would not only be able to help Uncle Titus, but would also be on-site carpenters, available to anyone who came into the Salvage Yard looking for a specially sized door or window or piece of furniture.
“Uncle Titus jumped out as Leif and Magnus climbed down.
"Boys!" he yelled. "Wait 'til you see what I found! But before we start unloading – " He crossed his arms on his chest and looked at Jupiter.
"While I was driving, I thought of a puzzle for you. If the day after tomorrow comes three days after Wednesday, then what was the day before yesterday?"
Pete's head spun. Uncle Titus was always doing this, and, what was worse, Jupiter was always up to the challenge. Jupiter smiled and pinched his lower lip between his thumb and forefinger – the sign that he was thinking hard.
"Let's see," he said. "Three days after Wednesday is Saturday. If that's the day after tomorrow, then today must be Thursday. And in that case, the day before yesterday has to be Tuesday."
Uncle Titus roared with appreciation and smacked his hands together. "That's my boy!" he said. "Right on the money. Now let's get to work."
He put his hands on Pete's and Jupiter's shoulders and shepherded them toward the back of the truck. Leif and Magnus had already dropped the tailgate and removed the blue tarpaulin that had covered the new salvage.
“What's that all over your fingers, Pete?" Uncle Titus asked.
Pete stared down at his hands in surprise. "It's ink from the letterpress."
"Then you'd better stand back and let the rest of us unload," Uncle Titus said.
"But it's already dry!" Pete said.
"Let's not take chances," Uncle Titus said.
Pete groaned in frustration. Crestfallen, he stepped back and let the others begin the work as Jupiter's Aunt Mathilda joined them. She was a large woman, but a fast thinker like her husband – if not given to all his enthusiasms. She had a preference for items she could sell.
"Well, Titus," she said, her hands on her hips. "What have we here?"
"Look at this, Mathilda," Uncle Titus said. There was a stained glass window of twining vines with red berries which Aunt Mathilda very much admired, an old oak armoire, a set of armor that might or might not have been real (Aunt Mathilda shook her head doubtfully), an antique cash register with some of the keys missing, and an ugly square box with a curved gray screen.
"Titus?" Aunt Mathilda said incredulously. "What are we going to do with a 1960s black and white TV?"
"Never mind that," Uncle Titus said. "What do you make of these?"
Jupiter helped his uncle unwrap what looked to be a stack of pictures, each about three feet wide by four feet high, printed on thin sheets of shiny metal.
"These are great, Uncle Titus," Jupiter said.
"Wow!" Pete said. "What are they?"
There were eight of them, each different, each a riot of color and form, and each a mystery to Pete.
The one that caught his attention had, on its top, a very old Chinese man wearing a green crown and holding a fat green sword. He was swathed in a saffron robe on which were three circles. In each circle were three black lines, some of them broken in the middle – and looking very much like the top or bottom half of the symbols his mother consulted nearly every day in her copy of the I Ching.
The man's eyebrows slanted up, his mustache slanted down, and his hair and beard whooshed away from his face as if every follicle was electrified. Below him, on the bottom half of the panel, was a configuration of thick black lines, straight and curved, beautifully arranged but conveying no meaning to Pete – though they didn't look like regular Chinese characters.
"Boys," Uncle Titus said proudly. "These are Chinese talismans. The one that fascinates Pete is a Chinese talisman against demons."
CHAPTER 3 SELECTION 1 (JUPITER)
Fifteen minutes later, the boys were finally sitting inside the old mobile home trailer, and Jupiter was happy to be there at last. They'd been delayed in their arrival because - as Jupiter had eventually deduced - when Pete had come in earlier in the day, he'd emerged with his hands full of card stock and had forgotten to put the key to Easy Three back in the metal box where it belonged after the door had locked behind him.
Easy Three was a big oak door - still on its hinges and in its frame - that blocked a clear view of Headquarters. Next to the door, as a joke, was a dented metal sign that read "Office," with a finger pointing to the entrance. A big metal key, concealed in a rusty metal box in a barrel of other rusty metal, opened the lock - after which a short passageway led to the original side door of the mobile home trailer.
Because Easy Three really was an easy entrance, when the boys first started their firm, they'd used it only on rare occasions. In those days, Jupiter reflected, the boys had been smaller (and younger) and had gotten a kick out of clambering into Headquarters through Tunnel Two - a length of corrugated pipe hidden behind the printing press and an old metal grate.
The pipe led to a trapdoor in the floor of Headquarters, but although the boys had long ago put down carpeting to save their knees, all three of them had grown too tall to want to wiggle through the pipe any longer - and the trapdoor was a special kind of torture.
For these reasons, they almost never used Tunnel Two any more - though Jupiter sometimes used a panel at the back of the mobile home that was accessed from Red Gate Rover. Since Emergency One - an escape hatch in the roof of the mobile home that led directly to an old kid's slide - only opened from the inside, Easy Three was the entrance they almost always used now.
Jupiter had found the missing key by asking Pete to review everything he'd done when he'd gone into Headquarters earlier to get more card stock. Pete had told Jupiter that he'd dropped some of the paper onto an old apple press when he'd been coming out - at which Jupiter deduced that Pete had also had the key in his hands when he dropped the stock and bent down to pick it up. Shortly afterwards, Jupiter had discovered the key inside the apple press, and now he and his two best friends were sitting comfortably around the phone in Headquarters, preparing to call Hector Sebastian.
Over the years, Headquarters had gotten more and more crammed with stuff. On the floor in the corner, under a layer of dust, was an old Olympia typewriter, and on the desk sat an aging computer with a monitor, a run-down printer, a rather large magnifying glass, a sub-station of the Salvage Yard's intercom that connected Headquarters to Aunt Mathilda's office, and an old-fashioned phone Jupiter had salvaged when his uncle brought it back in a box of junk.
The walls had built-in shelves piled high with supplies - including various telephone directories, outdated copies of the Yellow Pages, a dictionary, and other reference books - while a small gray, dented filing cabinet was filled to bursting with research and notes from old cases. From the ceiling hung a single shaded light bulb that cast a dim glow over everything, and as Bob cleared an open space on the desk on which to set his backpack, Jupiter made a mental note to spend an afternoon with his friends cleaning the place out.
Not today, though. Now that they were finally inside Headquarters, Jupiter could hardly wait to hear Hector Sebastian's news. In the past, this had almost always led to a case for The Three Investigators, and with summer just starting, Jupiter was anxious for a new challenge. He settled himself in a broken-down swivel desk chair behind the desk - one end of which had been scorched in a fire - while Pete and Bob sat in folding chairs opposite him.
The boys had Hector Sebastian's cellphone number on speed-dial, and Jupiter punched the code and the speakerphone button so all three of them could hear and talk.
CHAPTER 3 SELECTION 2 (JUPITER)
"Why isn't Mr. Sebastian calling back?" Bob asked.
"His phone is being blocked by the canyon," Jupiter said. "I'm sure he'll call as soon as he can."
At that exact moment, the phone rang.
"Three Investigators' Headquarters," Jupiter said. "Jupiter Jones speaking."
"Jupiter, it's Hector Sebastian. A thousand apologies for the interruption."
"Mr. Sebastian?" Pete blurted out. "Why do you have to move to Wyoming? Can't you just live here and write about the Old West?"
"Pete," Mr. Sebastian said. "Obviously you have never been to Wyoming."
"You can say that again," Pete said. "Though my father almost went there once to work on a movie being filmed in some sort of Wild West town."
"It's another world," Mr. Sebastian said. "Sagebrush deserts and red rock cliffs, pristine rivers and elk and wolves and moose."
"Wolves?" said Pete. "Really?"
"Really. Your father would have loved it. And I think I've heard of that Wild West town. It's on a movie ranch called the Malachi Wagner Movie Ranch. It's on the west side of the Wind River Mountains," Hector Sebastian said. "I've found a house to rent on a dude ranch - well, they call them guest ranches now - near Dubois, on the other side. Now, let me finish before we get disconnected again. I want you boys to come to my house early tomorrow afternoon. I have two things to give you."
Jupiter smiled with satisfaction. One of them was surely a new case.
Hector Sebastian cleared his throat. "I said you wouldn't like the first thing I had to tell you, and I was right. But I'm sure you'll like this one."
"Should I take notes, Mr. Sebastian?" Bob asked."
"No need, Bob. Plenty of time for that. Just listen closely."
All three boys leaned forward instinctively.
"I have an old friend," Hector Sebastian went on. "Her name is Isabella Chang. She's in her mid-80s, but she's still as energetic as a colt and sharp as a good cheddar. I've told her about you boys and she's interested in speaking with you."
Jupiter could see that his friends were as intent on the details as he was.
"Isabella taught history to 9th and 10th graders, and since she retired, she's turned her hand to writing books - mostly about some aspect of California history. Her new book is a bit different in that it ties together that history with her family history."
"I take it from her name that your friend is Chinese," Jupiter said.
"Yes," Hector Sebastian said. "But other things as well. Like most Americans, she's a product of the melting pot - though it's true that the ancestor she's now interested in was Chinese. Well, both Chinese and Irish. She's trying to find out about a man named Li Chang whose Irish mother and Chinese father met and married during the Gold Rush."
"Wow," Bob said. "I was just reading about the Gold Country."
"Li was educated in a one-room schoolhouse in a hamlet near the town of Cool. And that's the tie-in. Because Isabella's book is about Abecedarian Academies."
"A B C what?" Bob asked.
"That's what Isabella calls one-room schoolhouses. ‘Abecedarian’ as an adjective means either ‘arranged alphabetically’ or ‘rudimentary and elementary,’ but A-B-C-darians were the youngest students in the typical one-room schools of 19th-century America."
"What a great word!" Bob said. "And because of the way it starts, I doubt I'll ever forget it."
Jupiter wanted to hear more about the case. "But how can we help your friend?" he asked.
"As I said, Isabella is getting older, and though she's spry in many ways, her eyesight isn't what it was. She can't read and research as well as she used to, and she isn't able to use computers. Since she knows a lot of genealogical research is appearing online these days, she's looking for help in finding out more about Li. Do you think you boys could help?"
Jupiter was, if truth be told, a little disappointed. Researching genealogical information on the Internet wasn't likely to be as challenging or exciting as some of their past cases had been. But then again, who could tell? The most complex mysteries often began quite quietly, and, after all, the motto of The Three Investigators was We Investigate Anything.
“She'll tell you more if you can come to my house tomorrow. It seems that Li's father was murdered."
"Murdered!" Pete said. "Yikes!"
Already, Jupiter thought, things were getting more interesting. Not that he approved of murder, of course. But when there were murders, there were also strong emotions, and strong emotions were frequently at the heart of mysteries.
© Elizabeth Arthur and Steven Bauer 2025
Cover Art By Pashur House