When eleven-year-old Cat Kinsey builds a secret hideout to escape her unhappy homelife, she slowly gets to know a poor family who have come to California after losing their Texas home to the dust storms of the 1930s.

"A long-buried family secret resurfaces when one of Aloysius Pendergast's most implacable enemies shows up on his doorstep as a murdered corpse. The mystery has all the hallmarks of the perfect murder, save for an enigmatic clue: a piece of turquoise lodged in the stomach of the deceased. The gem leads Pendergast to an abandoned mine on the shore of California's desolate Salton Sea, which in turn propels him on a journey of discovery deep into his...

Corrie Belle Hollister and her family travel to California in 1852 and settle near Sacramento.

After moving to California, seventh-grader Devin is afraid she will not make the soccer team but finds, instead, that the team is so bad that she is compelled to take the lead and turn it into something the players and coach can all be proud of.

"Stella and her family drive to Los Angeles to attend her aunt Laura's wedding. Stella is excited to be a flower girl but things don't go as planned. She accidently sprays paint on her aunt's wedding dress and the daughter of the man marrying Aunt Laura wants to run away"--

Los Angeles police officer Jack McGarvey, badly wounded in a shoot-out, decides to move his family to a Montana ranch that has been willed to him by the father of his former partner, only to have his son Toby become the target of the Givers, creatures from another dimension who want control of the child for their own evil purposes.

In 1987, when sixteen-year-old Mayhem and her mother leave her abusive stepfather and return to Santa Maria, California, May learns she is heir to magical power, destined to stop evildoers.

Forced to return to her family in Fool's Gold, Calif., after an injury, dancer Evie Stryker agrees to stage the town's winter festival, the rehearsal space for which is above bad-boy lawyer Dante Jefferson's office.

Mission Beach is starting to feel more like home to Juliet, especially now that she is an official member of the Starry Beach Club (dedicated to making wishes come true), together with her new friends, Emma and Carmen; their current project is saving the local bookmobile which needs rent money, fast, and Emma's idea is to have a fund-raising crafts fair where she expects Juliet to sell her paintings--an idea that Juliet is not really comfortable with....

"Eleven-year-old Zomorod, originally from Iran, tells her story of growing up Iranian in Southern California during the Iranian Revolution and hostage crisis of the late 1970s"--