When their father is sent away to prison, three London children move to the country where they keep busy preventing accidents on the nearby railway, making many new friends, and generally learning a good deal about themselves.

When Jerry, Jimmy and Kathleen are forced to spend their entire summer at school they don't imagine they will have a particularly interesting time. But that's before they stumble upon a mysterious castle set in beautiful, abandoned gardens. Could this really be an enchanted castle? Don't be a duffer, there's no such thing. But with the air thick with magic, the sun blazing down, and a maze hiding a sleeping girl at its centre, the holidays might just...

Eleven-year-old Theodosia's ability to detect black magic raises her suspicions about a magician known as the Great Awi Bubu, while Henry, home for the spring holidays, discovers an artifact at the Museum of Legends and Antiquities that is coveted by every black-cloaked occultist in London.

While visiting an old castle in England, Samantha and Nellie solve mysteries involving a ghost and some missing rare books.

Fourteen-year-old Daphne, spunky and imaginative, has grown up in a London orphanage dreaming she will someday learn the identity of her parents and become a prima ballerina, and when a mysterious package arrives with a pair of stockings and a book inscribed with a riddle, her journey to the truth begins.

Relates what becomes of Ermengarde and the other girls left behind at Miss Minchin's School after Sara Crewe leaves to live with her guardian, the Indian gentleman.