5In 1769, the Live Oak, a ship smuggling precious cargo, bound for the colony of New York wrecked off Squan Beach, a coastal section of the colony of New Jersey. One survivor, a teenage slave girl named Marcella, carried with her, a treasure which belonged her best friend, a treasure she keeps hidden for the rest of her life. Two hundred years later in that same coastal town of Manasquan, sixteen-year-old Mike Allen, along with his best friends Nick Johnson and Lynn Conroy, solve three seemingly unrelated mysteries. In the process Mike is both befriended and betrayed by a retired NYPD detective, chased by criminals running a forgery ring, who drive his best friend off the road forcing Mike and his friends, for the first time to face the finality of death. Solving each mystery brings Mike closer to the realization that all the mysteries are connected, and that, all the while he has had the key to unraveling a two-hundred-year-old secret and the treasure it holds.