I DON'T KNOW WHY I FELT SICK. I MEAN, YES, IT WAS THE FIRST DEAD BODY I EVER SAW. BUT I SHOULD HAVE BEEN MORE COMFORTABLE. AFTER ALL, MY WHOLE FAMILY LIKES DEAD THINGS.... Thirteen-year-old Finnegan Zwake is staying with his Uncle Stoppard, a bestselling mystery writer, and still hoping his parents will return from an archaeological expedition in Iceland. They disappeared there several years ago. Life with his uncle is fairly normal—until the day Finn discovers a body in the basement. A dead body. It's in the storage area where Finn's parents left behind gold treasure from their last expedition. And missing from the storage space is a magnificent Mayan gold figure, the Horizontal Man....

Thirteen-year-old sleuth Finnegan discovers that digging up the past is not always a good idea when he accompanies his uncle and their friend Jared on an archeological expedition to Aguilar, where they will uncover a rare dinosaur egg and evidence of murder. Original.

When his uncle is nominated for a prestigious award, Finn joins him on a trip to Morocco for the ceremony, but foul play begins to dog their steps and threaten their lives

Finn," he said, "Don't go in." What was his problem? After days of climbing and trudging through the snow, I wasn't going to turn around now. I pushed past Uncle Stoppard into the cave and then froze. The murky light from the mouth of the tunnel gleamed on something a few feet in front of me. Something white lay on the floor of the cave. Bones. Finn and his mystery-writer uncle head to Iceland in search of the Haunted City of Tquuli, where Finn's archaeologist parents were last seen before their odd disappearance eight years ago. Finn doesn't believe the creepy legends about the Haunted City and the ancient Vikings who lived there—until a member of the rock-climbing expedition vanishes from inside a sleeping bag...one that was dangling a hundred feet from the base of an icy cliff! Then another climber disappears, leaving a trail of footprints that abruptly end in a Þeld of snow. Is it modern-day murder, or the revenge of phantom Viking warriors?

While searching for his missing archeologist parents in the Great Barrier Reef, Finn is separated from his Uncle Stoppard by a tropical storm and picked up by a ship led by the notorious female pirate, Blue Jade. Original.