The Mystery of the Barking Branches and the Sunken Ship — Judy Bradbury

Pesky was pawing at something. Maya leaned over to take a closer look. At the edge of a patch of wildflowers there was a hard, round bump. Was it just a rock? Or was something buried there? When five friends set off to solve the mystery of a "barking" tree, they unearth a remnant of a famous battleship built in the 1600s! The island they live on is home to a whole lot of history and, it turns out, a whole lot of mystery, too... Meet the Cayuga Island Kids! It's summer vacation, and that means there's plenty of time for a quest, a mystery, and exciting adventure. This first book in the Cayuga Island Kids chapter book series is loosely based on one of the most intriguing unsolved mysteries of the Great Lakes: the disappearance of fur-trading ship the Griffon. As the kids follow clues offered by the cannonball they find, young readers will learn about taking notes, verifying sources, and what an adventure doing research can be, learning to be "fact detectives" like the Cayuga Island Kids. The second book in the series, The Adventure of the Big Fish by the Small Creek, will release in Fall 2021.