Fourteen-year-old Ned Meyers has just lost his mother and now finds himself in the care of a father he feels he barely knows. Uprooted from San Francisco and the only home he has ever known, he is moved to a small town on the Northern California coast. There, he discovers that he is literally living next door to the world’s longest-running and most mysterious treasure hunt, a quest that goes back centuries and has claimed countless lives.

Drawn into the search by the combination of his curiosity and a barely-understood yearning to be part of something both great and good, he is joined by a cast of characters that includes the first girl he has ever kissed, “saucy” (as Ned’s father calls her) Maddie Wilkins. As they approach the solution to the riddle of Cloak Island, Ned, Maddie and their adult companions find the mystery deepening, the danger increasing and the importance of their search rising to an epic scale. They stand on the brink of something more momentous than they could possibly have imagined, then continue forward into a solution they know will change their lives forever.