The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn

Anthony Monday doesn’t have many friends, and his home life is a wreck. But he does have Miss Eells, the librarian at the Hoosac Public Library, and he has an adventure waiting for him right around the corner.

When Miss Eells gives Anthony a job at the library, he thinks he’ll just be dusting shelves and filing books. Instead, he discovers a hidden clue leading to the treasure of eccentric millionaire Alpheus Winterborn. Miss Eells thinks the clues are a practical joke left by the odd, old Winterborn before he died. But if that’s the case, then why do things start getting so scary so quickly? The closer they get to solving the mystery, the closer Winterborn’s evil nephew Hugo Philpotts lurks in the shadows, waiting to snatch the treasure out of their hands.

This first book in John Bellairs’s Anthony Monday Mystery series will have young readers on the edge of their seats, desperate to race ahead to the story’s final surprise.

John Bellairs is beloved as a master of Gothic young adult novels and fantasies. His series about the adventures of Lewis Barnavelt and his uncle Jonathan, which includes The House with a Clock in Its Walls, is a classic. He also wrote a series of novels featuring the character Johnny Dixon. Among the titles in that series are The Curse of the Blue Figurine; The Mummy, The Will,   and The Crypt; The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull; and others. His solo novel The Face in the Frost is also regarded as a fantasy classic, and among his earlier works are St. Fidgeta and Other Parodies and The Pedant and the Shuffly. Bellairs was a prolific writer, publishing more than one dozen novels before his untimely death in 1991.