Nine-year-old Elizabeth lives a comfortable, if not boring, life in the hills of Virginia on the campus of Kinsington College, where her mother teaches. She and her sidekicks, Rufus and Becky, run a less than successful detective agency until Elizabeth and her faithful dog, Beauty, discover a map to Grisby McGee's legendary buried treasure, hidden somewhere on the college campus. What starts as a simple treasure hunt lands Elizabeth and her friends in the middle of a series of dangerous encounter with unsavory characters who would have the gold for themselves. To make things even more difficult, the map provides a number of riddles each of which must be solved in order to obtain their objectives of finding the gold and saving Kinsington College from a financial crisis.
