Ree Dolly's father, an addict facing a drug charge who has put their house up as bond, has gone missing and Ree, who is caring for her two younger brothers and a mentally-ill mother, knows she must find him to save her family.

Sixteen-year-old Alexander Cold accompanies his grandmother, a writer for a geography magazine, to the remote Forbidden Kingdom in the Himalayas to help locate a sacred statue of a golden dragon before it is stolen by a greedy outsider.

Fifteen-year-old Peak Marcello is invited to participate in an "International Peace Ascent" in the Hindu Kush, with a team made up of under-eighteen-year-old climbers from around the world--but from the first something seems wrong, so when the group is attacked, and most of the climbers are either killed or kidnapped, Peak finds himself caught up in a struggle to survive, shadowed by the Shen, a mysterious snow leopard.

In the year 1912, nineteen-year-old Christy Huddleston leaves home to teach school in the Smoky Mountain. There she came to know and love the wild mountain people with their fierce pride, dark superstitions, their terrible poverty, and their yearning for beauty and truth. Christy found her faith severely challenged in these primitive surroundings; and confronted with two young men of unique strength and needs, she found her own growing yearnings challenged...

Sophomore Hallie Calhoun, her former friend Jonah, and new friend Rachel leave a church youth group hike in the Great Smoky Mountains and become lost for five days, struggling to survive as Hallie finally speaks about the incident that made her a social pariah and Jonah admits why it hurt him so much.

Three friends team up to solve a mystery in a snowy chateau up the mountains.