The Metal Detector Mystery
Buried Secrets on Maple Street

About this book:

Twelve-year-old Julian expected a bicycle for his birthday. Instead, his grandfather handed him a 1971 Terra-Scan metal detector—transistorized, temperamental, and allegedly capable of finding the gold brooch his great-grandmother lost the year the Armistice was signed. The real treasure, however, isn't in the backyard. It's waiting under the hard-packed clay of the Maple Street playground: a bronze plate the size of a manhole cover, cast with heavy serifs spelling a name the town has spent a century forgetting.

Julian's first dig brings a 1947 wheat penny and a warning from Mr. Henderson, the cane-carrying neighbor who guards the park like a dragon its hoard. But the old man's urgency only sharpens the mystery. Why does the town founder's journal mention a "compact" buried beneath the merry-go-round? What happened to the copper coin that vanished from the historical society in 1924? And why does the detector sing loudest after dark, when the swings move on their own?

With each chapter, the signals grow stronger—midnight beeps from the slide, a rusted key in the sandbox, a tin box locked with a cipher only the town's buried past can solve. *The Metal Detector Mystery* is a love letter to the thrill of the hunt, the weight of history underfoot, and the secrets that rise when a boy with a vintage machine refuses to stop digging.