Arthur Bash is the school thug-for-hire (paid in candy bars), mostly because he just looks the part, so when orphan Darius Drake offers him three candy bars to accompany him to the run-down Stompanado Housing Complex, and just look menacing, he agrees--and soon finds himself deep in a mystery involving Darius' estranged grandfather, the lost Dunbar Diamonds, and the villainous Jasper Jones.

Douglas Deeds, a fifteen-year-old orphan, keeps a journal of his travels by wagon train as a member of the ill-fated Donner Party, which became stranded in the Sierra Nevada mountains in the winter of 1846-47.