What do you think?
Rate this book
New Three Investigators #3
The Mystery of the Chimeric Cornucopia
The bats never left — and neither did the killer’s shadow.
The Salvage Yard is still there. So is the secret headquarters. And so are the Three Investigators—smarter than ever, a little older, and ready for their most challenging cases yet.
Conceived and co-written by Elizabeth Arthur, the daughter of Robert Arthur, the creator of the Three Investigators universe, this exciting reboot of the classic series takes its iconic characters into a new age. They return reimagined, reinvigorated, and more relevant than ever.
In the third book of a 26-book story arc, the Three Investigators head to Jackson, California, for a Fourth of July celebration at the vineyard of their new friend Branko Petrovic. Jupiter hopes the visit will bring him closer to solving the mystery of his long-dead mother, but his only clue is that she was Serbian - and her name, Amanda Morris, doesn't seem to fit.
After receiving a finder's fee from their summer's first case, the boys use part of their earnings to buy a used car, and Worthington drives them north. On the way, Bob shares a story about André Laurent, a French-Canadian counterfeiter and murderer who had been arrested in Jackson twenty-five years earlier, only to skip bail and vanish.
The investigation takes an unexpected turn when the boys stumble upon Laurent's old counterfeiting operation - an offset press and engraved plates for printing one-hundred-dollar bills - hidden deep in a cavern on Branko's family’s property, and guarded by a colony of nesting bats. But their interest and amazement soon turn to trepidation when they realize Laurent has returned to reclaim the stolen plates, and that they’re holding the evidence he'll stop at nothing to get back.
Where has André Laurent been for the past twenty-five years and why has he burned off his own fingerprints? How does he find out where The Three Investigators are staying? And how is all of this connected to Jupiter's mysterious family tree? As fireworks light up the sky at Dragutin Wines, Jupiter uncovers part of the truth about his mother, but a dangerous confrontation with Laurent leaves him and his friends facing life-threatening peril.
Join Jupiter, Pete, and Bob as they uncover the facts about a quarter-century-old crime, chase down a ruthless criminal, and discover the truth about Jupiter's parentage in this action-packed new addition to the Three Investigators series.
The Salvage Yard is still there. So is the secret headquarters. And so are the Three Investigators—smarter than ever, a little older, and ready for their most challenging cases yet.
Conceived and co-written by Elizabeth Arthur, the daughter of Robert Arthur, the creator of the Three Investigators universe, this exciting reboot of the classic series takes its iconic characters into a new age. They return reimagined, reinvigorated, and more relevant than ever.
In the third book of a 26-book story arc, the Three Investigators head to Jackson, California, for a Fourth of July celebration at the vineyard of their new friend Branko Petrovic. Jupiter hopes the visit will bring him closer to solving the mystery of his long-dead mother, but his only clue is that she was Serbian - and her name, Amanda Morris, doesn't seem to fit.
After receiving a finder's fee from their summer's first case, the boys use part of their earnings to buy a used car, and Worthington drives them north. On the way, Bob shares a story about André Laurent, a French-Canadian counterfeiter and murderer who had been arrested in Jackson twenty-five years earlier, only to skip bail and vanish.
The investigation takes an unexpected turn when the boys stumble upon Laurent's old counterfeiting operation - an offset press and engraved plates for printing one-hundred-dollar bills - hidden deep in a cavern on Branko's family’s property, and guarded by a colony of nesting bats. But their interest and amazement soon turn to trepidation when they realize Laurent has returned to reclaim the stolen plates, and that they’re holding the evidence he'll stop at nothing to get back.
Where has André Laurent been for the past twenty-five years and why has he burned off his own fingerprints? How does he find out where The Three Investigators are staying? And how is all of this connected to Jupiter's mysterious family tree? As fireworks light up the sky at Dragutin Wines, Jupiter uncovers part of the truth about his mother, but a dangerous confrontation with Laurent leaves him and his friends facing life-threatening peril.
Join Jupiter, Pete, and Bob as they uncover the facts about a quarter-century-old crime, chase down a ruthless criminal, and discover the truth about Jupiter's parentage in this action-packed new addition to the Three Investigators series.
326 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 3, 2025
1 person is currently reading
6 people want to read
About the author
Elizabeth Arthur
29 books21 followersElizabeth Arthur was born on November 15, 1953 in New York City. She is the daughter of Robert Arthur, a fantasy, horror and mystery writer and the creator of The Three Investigators mystery book series for young people. She was educated at Concord Academy in Concord, Massachusetts, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Notre Dame University of Nelson, British Columbia, and the University of Victoria in Victoria, B.C.
Her first book, Island Sojourn - a memoir about building a house on a wilderness island in northern Canada - was published in 1980 by Harper and Row. A second memoir, Looking For The Klondike Stone, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1993. She has also published five novels - Beyond the Mountain (Harper and Row, 1983), Bad Guys (Knopf, 1986), Binding Spell (Doubleday 1989), Antarctic Navigation (Knopf, 1995), and Bring Deeps (Bloomsbury U.K., 2003).
Athur's novel Antarctic Navigation - an 800-page epic narrated by an American woman who sets out to recreate Robert Falcon Scott's British Antarctic Expedition of 1910-1912 - was chosen by the New York Times as a Notable Book, received a Critics' Choice Award from the San Francisco Review of Books, and was chosen as a Best Book of 1995 by A Common Reader. In 1996 the novel received the Ohioana Book Award for Fiction from the Ohioana Library Association.
These awards came on the heels of two NEA Fellowships, as well as an operational support grant from the Division of Polar Programs at the National Science Foundation - the first ever given to a fiction writer.
Arthur has taught creative writing at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, the University of Cincinnati, and Indiana University/Purdue University of Indianapolis - where she directed the creative writing program. She has been married to the writer and editor Steven Bauer since June of 1982, and the two of them have recently completed twenty-six books in a contemporary Three Investigators mystery book series, updated for a new generation of readers.
Her first book, Island Sojourn - a memoir about building a house on a wilderness island in northern Canada - was published in 1980 by Harper and Row. A second memoir, Looking For The Klondike Stone, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1993. She has also published five novels - Beyond the Mountain (Harper and Row, 1983), Bad Guys (Knopf, 1986), Binding Spell (Doubleday 1989), Antarctic Navigation (Knopf, 1995), and Bring Deeps (Bloomsbury U.K., 2003).
Athur's novel Antarctic Navigation - an 800-page epic narrated by an American woman who sets out to recreate Robert Falcon Scott's British Antarctic Expedition of 1910-1912 - was chosen by the New York Times as a Notable Book, received a Critics' Choice Award from the San Francisco Review of Books, and was chosen as a Best Book of 1995 by A Common Reader. In 1996 the novel received the Ohioana Book Award for Fiction from the Ohioana Library Association.
These awards came on the heels of two NEA Fellowships, as well as an operational support grant from the Division of Polar Programs at the National Science Foundation - the first ever given to a fiction writer.
Arthur has taught creative writing at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, the University of Cincinnati, and Indiana University/Purdue University of Indianapolis - where she directed the creative writing program. She has been married to the writer and editor Steven Bauer since June of 1982, and the two of them have recently completed twenty-six books in a contemporary Three Investigators mystery book series, updated for a new generation of readers.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 6, 2025
Of this new Three Investigators series, I found this to easily be the best of the first batch of three, though that praise may be somewhat faint. For a juvenile mystery series (if that's what this continues to be), the focus in these books is decidedly not on the mysteries. I like what the authors have done with the characters, deepening them while keeping them true to the original books, and I welcome the introspective passages that explain characters' feelings and motivations. But, as I said in my review of the first book, in works of his sort, such passages need to be balanced with engaging mysteries, suspenseful action, and clever deduction. (I really have to wonder what these books would have been like had the authors worked with an understanding but firm editor.) In this book, Arthur and Bauer include an extended scene of suspense and one of action, proving that they're capable of writing such material. I hope future books in the series will include more along these lines. Thankfully absent in this third book are some of the proselytizing and info-dumping that annoyed me so much in the first two books. The scaling back of the political discourse gives me hope that things are on the upswing for the series as a whole. (As with the first two books, I found the ending in this third book to be especially well written.)
Still, I can't help but see these books as something of an oddity. The covers and titles don't appear designed to draw a young audience. The alternative is that these stories are written for existing fans, the vast majority of whom could be said to be middle-aged to old. It seems that any writer would know that the majority (not all, by any means, but a majority) of existing fans want to read stories that would be very much along the lines of a Robert Arthur story, set in the 1960s-70s.
Instead, the writers chose to reimagine the series. In doing so, I think they show regard for the way the boys were originally described. They don't do as well with reimagining the mysteries and investigations, though. There are no red herrings, no misdirection. But if we're to take this series as one continuous story, then what we've seen to date could be considered something of a prologue, and things will ramp up as the story progresses.
What makes this reimagination more strange to me is that Elizabeth Arthur reissued her father's books as originally written--well, not as originally written, as Hitchcock is absent, but certainly not as reimagined versions. In this new series we occasionally hear characters referring to events in the original books as having happened in the distant past, which makes no sense to me.
These discrepancies make it very difficult for me to reconcile this new series with the original. Some people don't care about that kind of thing and can enjoy these books as something new and different and not be bothered by any apparent discrepancies with the originals. And that's fine. I can't fault Arthur and Bauer for writing the type of book they would like to read, and if there are others who enjoy them, all the better. And it could be that, at the end of this series, there'll be some kind of revelation, some kind of The Girl on the Train moment, that's going to make us all look at everything that's gone before with a new, informed perspective that'll leave us shaking our heads at the brilliance of it all, and that will leave even the harshest critic shouting, "Bravo!"
This third book gave me hope that this series will improve as it progresses. I won't be buying books 4-6 when they're first available in a couple of months, as I don't have the time to keep up with them. But if there are some reviews here that indicate the next set is an improvement on the first, I'll be buying them later.
Still, I can't help but see these books as something of an oddity. The covers and titles don't appear designed to draw a young audience. The alternative is that these stories are written for existing fans, the vast majority of whom could be said to be middle-aged to old. It seems that any writer would know that the majority (not all, by any means, but a majority) of existing fans want to read stories that would be very much along the lines of a Robert Arthur story, set in the 1960s-70s.
Instead, the writers chose to reimagine the series. In doing so, I think they show regard for the way the boys were originally described. They don't do as well with reimagining the mysteries and investigations, though. There are no red herrings, no misdirection. But if we're to take this series as one continuous story, then what we've seen to date could be considered something of a prologue, and things will ramp up as the story progresses.
What makes this reimagination more strange to me is that Elizabeth Arthur reissued her father's books as originally written--well, not as originally written, as Hitchcock is absent, but certainly not as reimagined versions. In this new series we occasionally hear characters referring to events in the original books as having happened in the distant past, which makes no sense to me.
These discrepancies make it very difficult for me to reconcile this new series with the original. Some people don't care about that kind of thing and can enjoy these books as something new and different and not be bothered by any apparent discrepancies with the originals. And that's fine. I can't fault Arthur and Bauer for writing the type of book they would like to read, and if there are others who enjoy them, all the better. And it could be that, at the end of this series, there'll be some kind of revelation, some kind of The Girl on the Train moment, that's going to make us all look at everything that's gone before with a new, informed perspective that'll leave us shaking our heads at the brilliance of it all, and that will leave even the harshest critic shouting, "Bravo!"
This third book gave me hope that this series will improve as it progresses. I won't be buying books 4-6 when they're first available in a couple of months, as I don't have the time to keep up with them. But if there are some reviews here that indicate the next set is an improvement on the first, I'll be buying them later.
December 19, 2025
My son and I have read the first three book from the new series and they are all spectacular. However, this was my least favorite of the three. The main story was fun about the counterfeiter but it dragged at times in other parts. In fact, the last two chapters were too long.
I’m sure Santa will bring us others so we’ll be reading those in the New Year!
I’m sure Santa will bring us others so we’ll be reading those in the New Year!
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews