The purchase of a slave for their teacher leads a group of schoolboys in ancient Rome into a dangerous intrigue.

In an effort to save a boy wrongly accused, a group of young friends living in ancient Rome search for the culprit who scrawled graffiti on the temple wall.

Three Australian children, adrift on a rubber raft, are cast ashore in a strange land of tiny people.

Suspecting their friend Jonathan is alive, Flavia, Nubia, and Lupus go to Rome for the Colosseum Games, facing wild beasts, criminals, conspirators, and gladiators, and where Nubia is called upon to make a terrible choice.

When a mysterious envelope arrives for Jake Ransom, he and his older sister, Kady, are plunged into a gripping chain of events. An artifact found by their parents—on the expedition from which they never returned—leads Jake and Kady to a strange world inhabited by a peculiar mix of long-lost civilizations, a world that may hold the key to their parents' disappearance. But even as they enter the gate to this extraordinary place, savage grackyls soar across the sky, diving to attack. Jake's new friends, the pretty Mayan girl Marika and the Roman Pindor, say the grackyls were created by an evil alchemist—the Skull King. And as Jake struggles to find a way home, it becomes obvious that what the Skull King wants most is Jake and Kady—dead or alive.

ÊIt may be said that society itself creates the crimes that most beset it. If the good things of life were more evenly distributed, if everyone had his rights, if there were no injustice, no oppression, there would be no attempts to readjust an unequal balance by violent or flagitious means. There is some force in this, but it is very far from covering the whole ground, and it cannot excuse many forms of crime. Crime, indeed, is the birthmark of humanity, a fatal inheritance known to the theologians as original sin. Crime, then, must be constantly present in the community, and every son of Adam may, under certain conditions, be drawn into it. To paraphrase a great saying, some achieve crime, some have it thrust upon them; but most of us (we may make the statement without subscribing to all the doctrines of the criminal anthropologists) are born to crime. The assertion is as old as the hills; it was echoed in the fervent cry of pious John Bradford when he pointed to the man led out to execution, ÒThere goes John Bradford but for the grace of God!Ó Criminals are manufactured both by social cross-purposes and by the domestic neglect which fosters the first fatal predisposition. ÒAssuredly external factors and circumstances count for much in the causation of crime,Ó says Maudsley. The preventive agencies are all the more necessary where heredity emphasises the universal natural tendency. The taint of crime is all the more potent in those whose parentage is evil. The germ is far more likely to flourish into baleful vitality if planted by congenital depravity. This is constantly seen with the offspring of criminals. But it is equally certain that the poison may be eradicated, the evil stamped out, if better influences supervene betimes. Even the most ardent supporters of the theory of the Òborn criminalÓ admit that this, as some think, imaginary monster, although possessing all the fatal characteristics, does not necessarily commit crime. The bias may be checked; it may lie latent through life unless called into activity by certain unexpected conditions of time and chance. An ingenious refinement of the old adage, ÒOpportunity makes the thief,Ó has been invented by an Italian scientist, Baron Garofalo, who declares that Òopportunity only reveals the thiefÓ; it does not create the predisposition, the latent thievish spirit.

When the Pirates, a gang of young boys in the small town of Timpetill, become too rowdy, the adults decide to discipline them by leaving the town in the middle of the night.