When an adventurous sister-and-brother duo become orphans, a funny and heartbreaking roadtrip to New York ensues, as the pair searches for their long-lost uncle.

Told in their separate voices, twelve-year-old twins Percy and Penny are excited to spend a summer riding horses on their Uncle Stretch's Minnesota spread, until they discover it is a pig farm.

Tom, who comes from a long line of criminals, travels with his roguish uncle to India to find a family treasure--an antique jewel-encrusted tiger stolen from the sultan's throne hundreds of years ago.

In 1907 in Wisconsin, Kate and her friends discover a timber swindler while visiting their Indian friend Running Deer and suspect that Kate's uncle, newly arrived from Sweden, may be involved.

After their parents are declared dead, Leo and his brother Hollis are taken in by a wealthy but distant step-uncle, and when, on his thirteenth birthday, Leo acquires the ability to hear sounds from the past when touching certain objects, he tries to use the skill to rescue a dolphin, whatever the cost.

Tom goes with his Uncle Harvey to Peru, where they narrowly escape imprisonment and death as they hunt for buried treasure after tracking down a journal written by John Drake, a young relative of Sir Francis Drake, on a voyage to Lima in 1577. Includes biographical information on John and Francis Drake.

In 1934, during the Depression, Kit's cantankerous uncle comes to live in the Cincinnati boardinghouse run by her parents, enlisting her aid in transcribing his complaining letters to the editor of the local newspaper and inspiring her to write a different kind of letter of her own.