Dear Readers,
July’s mystery is set in one of the most beautiful — and, to me, most personally meaningful — landscapes in America: the high country of Wyoming. I've known these mountains and river valleys for many years, and writing this book gave me a way to return to them — not as a visitor, but as a storyteller.
Part Western, part wilderness survival story, and part cold-case mystery, this high-stakes adventure sends the Three Investigators deep into the heart of the Wind River Range — where the truth lies hidden among the pines and arrows fly before dawn.
When the boys arrive at the Double Fork Ranch — guests of Hector Sebastian and Phillipa Paxton — they’re expecting a week of horseback riding, fishing, and target sports. But they’re hardly off the plane before a ten-year-old murder case draws their attention. And then a priceless white bison calf vanishes, stolen from the ranch by rustlers who leave no tracks.
The book unfolds in two parts: Pete, Mallory, and a young Finnish-American ranch hand named Eino are captured and stranded in the mountains, while Jupiter and Bob stay behind, seriously worried and trying to figure out how to find them. With Jupiter and Bob is Eino’s girlfriend, River Carson.
River’s father – a man descended from a Texas Ranger — owns the Double Fork, and her mother is a full-blood Eastern Shoshone. But River has no trouble making sense of her bloodlines. She loves both sides of her heritage — the cowboy side and the Indian one — and she’s good at riding, wrangling, shooting, and keeping her head in dangerous situations.
The legend of the white buffalo is not a Shoshone story; it belongs to the Lakota Sioux, and tells of a holy woman who brought sacred knowledge and gifts to the people before transforming into a white buffalo.
Still, when the white calf is born on the ranch — the odds against it are one in many millions — River names it Shoshone Lightning, and her parents promise her it will never leave the Double Fork.
Unfortunately, the rustlers have other plans. And it seems that one of them was familiar with the Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Priory School.” It was fun to be able to slip a homage to Arthur Conan Doyle into a Three Investigators book.
Like the four books that preceded it, this one grew out of my desire to do something a little different with plot and theme in Season Three. When I arrived at Book 13, I thought it would be neat if not only the first three books of the season each involved a family member of the boy whose book it was, but if the next three took each boy on an unusually intense interior journey — one that revealed something new about life to each of them.
For Bob, in The Mystery of the Propitious Portal, that meant a major breakthrough in his relationship with Freya. But this book is Pete’s, and his breakthrough is of a different sort entirely. It involves him seeing himself clearly for the first time — in a new place, under new pressure, and in the wake of a case that tests him to the limit.
Warmly,
Elizabeth Arthur
Cover Art By Pashur House
BOOK DESCRIPTION FOR THE MYSTERY OF THE QUINTESSENTIAL QUIVERIn the seventeenth book of a 26-book story arc, The Three Investigators leave Rocky Beach and fly to Wyoming for a working vacation at Reese Carson’s Double Fork Ranch outside of Dubois. The boys and Mallory have been invited by Hector Sebastian, who rents a cabin on the ranch, and Philippa Paxton, who is with him for the summer.
But what awaits them is anything but relaxing. A rare white bison calf is stolen, a cold case on the Wind River Indian Reservation is reopened, and the vast mountain landscape becomes a stage for rustlers, secrets, and survival.
Years ago, three masked men robbed the Shoshone Rose Casino on the Reservation, killing a cashier before disappearing into the night. Now, a cold case unit led by Reese’s brother Rory is trying to solve the mystery, and the Wyoming vacation is interrupted when the five black-masked rustlers strike the Double Fork Ranch.
In the mountains, the Investigators – along with Reese, his daughter River, and ranch hand Eino – race on horseback after them, only to be separated by a freak accident. Pete, Mallory, and Eino are captured and taken to a remote location called Moosekill, where they are left stranded without food, maps, or shelter. Back at the ranch, Jupiter and Bob work furiously to connect the dots between the bison theft and the cold case, while Pete and Mallory try to figure out the rustlers’ plan.
Who are the men behind the masks – and why does one of them never speak when they can hear him? How do the rustlers plan to smuggle a bison out of the mountains? Where is the bison, anyway? And what do those odd metal contraptions on the horses’ hooves mean?
Join Jupiter and Bob as they uncover the connection between the rustlers and the long-ago murder, and Pete and Mallory as they thread their way out of the high mountains and toward a showdown where arrows fly and the fate of the bison calf hangs in the balance!
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