A constant worrier, Franklin Endicott earns a fresh cause for alarm when he accompanies Eugenia Lincoln to her favorite thrift shop and leaves with a mystery to solve.

Finley McPhee holds the scorpion key, which makes him the Defender of the Emporium in the small town of Applecross, Scotland, but now Aiby Lily and Finley's brother Doug are apparently lost in an other-worldly place called the passages, and the evil Semueld Askell has told him that if he does not surrender the key within twenty-four hours, they will be lost forever--and that is only one of his problems.

After an unexpectedly thrilling summer with his grandfather, Oregon State student Charley Sawyer is ready to catch his breath at his late parents' Oregon beach home. Hoping for some rest and relaxation, Charley is met instead by devastation: the house has been ransacked. In his inventory of the damage, Charley stumbles across the item the trespasser must have been after, the only thing that seems out of place: a mysterious key. And when he learns...