Parent and Teacher Guide

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Series Guide for Parents and Teachers

Overview

Adventure / Mystery / Historical Fiction

Tone: National Treasure meets The Hardy Boys, with a touch of Outer Banks. Mystery thriller pacing with real-world historical grounding and the excitement of hunting for hidden treasure.

Logline:
Three teenage young men uncover America’s buried truths—one treasure hunt at a time. 

Series Premise

In the coastal town of Ridgeport, North Carolina, three lifelong friends—high schoolers Ben Prescott, Porter Rockwell, and Latch McRae—spend their off-hours recovering sunken treasure, decoding lost American secrets, and (depending on the story) producing a podcast to document their finds. Their adventures lead them from Revolutionary crypts to Cold War bunkers, across forgotten battlefields and beneath the sea, always in pursuit of the next hidden chapter of American history.

 Standing in their way is the Alignment—a group working to erase or corrupt inconvenient truths of the past that don’t fit its preferred narrative.

 Each novel is a standalone “mission,” complete with a rotating cast of sidekicks, historical research, tech gear, and every couple of books, escalating encounters with the nefarious Alignment and its French-accented 20-something operative, Forigo. Though fast-paced and action-packed, the series is undergirded by traditional values, family loyalty, and the idea that America is worth understanding, cherishing, and defending.

The Hunters at a Glance

• Ben Prescott – The brain, the mystic, the researcher, the trailblazer
• Porter Rockwell – The man of action, the outgoing energizer, the high school QB
• Latch McRae – The mechanic and gear man, the realist, the heart 

Our three treasure hunters are ideal versions of certain male teen types. They also all have cool girlfriends (we don’t do romantic angst in these books. Much.) and access to excellent high-tech adventure gear via various adult connections and their own ingenuity.

Core Themes

•  Brotherhood: Loyal friends with different strengths, united by curiosity and mission
•  Faith: Characters of belief, acting without preaching
• Patriotism: America as a noble inheritance worth saving
• Mystery + History: Every book revolves around a real historical debate, mystery, or event
• High Tech Meets Old World: The hunters combine cutting-edge salvage tech with ancient clues and analog methods
• Clean & Classic: No dark antiheroes, horrific broken homes, or moral relativism—just teenage boys trying to do right and do good, one treasure hunt at a time

Target Audience

14 and up, but aimed squarely at a smart 16-year-old reader. The ATH characters are aspirational versions of the life and accomplishments that a 16-year-old might imagine for himself when he’s finally crossed the Rubicon and become a high school senior. Also has much crossover appeal to new adults, dads, and family readers, as well as precocious pre-teens.

For readers who . . .

• Prefer books with strong male leads and real-world history
• Are drawn to loyalty, brotherhood, maps, puzzles, codes, and clues
• Want family-affirming adventure without woke themes
• Are tired of stories where the adults are dumb, the boys are broken, and the nation is the villain

Series Constraints

Character Standards

• All of our characters are religious believers to one degree or another. They might kid one another over specifics, but this is never a source of contention.
• The hunters don’t drink, smoke, or do drugs. Alcohol use, illicit drugs, and smoking are not glamorized.
• The hunters don’t break the law except in an emergency. They’ll break into a house to save a life, but not to steal something for a hunt. This means that the treasures are disposed of legally at the end of the story.
• Sometimes, the hunters make mistakes. They learn from their mistakes, and they grow.
• The adults in their lives are competent and good. They trust the hunters to go out and do their thing, but sometimes the adults can be called on for help.
• The hunters aren’t from deeply broken homes, although Latch’s father is seldom home due to his profession. The parents can feel stresses, and there can be normal sibling disputes, but basically they like each other and are loving.
• The hunters and their families are reflexively patriotic. They don’t see the U.S. as an evil empire or an instrument to oppress the working classes or ethnic minorities.

Casting & Story Boundaries

• No D.E.I.
• No gay characters. Nobody is closeted. This is not commented on. It is simply not a theme or concern in the ATH books.
• No female main protagonists.
• No feminist girl-boss characters who challenge the boys’ beliefs, etc. Plenty of well-drawn female secondary characters, however.
• The ATH girlfriends (Piper, Maren, and Sloane) are cool role models themselves and often play significant roles in the stories.
• Very little romantic drama. All romance is hetero and unremarkable. Brief scenes of relatively chaste romance, mild making out, holding hands, and kissing between steadies.
• Clergymen are never bad guys in the stories.
• Care is taken to establish justification when depicting businessmen as bad guys.
• No white supremacist bad guys. This is not a thing.

Story Logic and Real-World Framing

• The hunters have all had significant range experience and safety training. They’re not frightened of guns, but also don’t walk around packing.
• Generally, cell phones should create as many problems as they solve for our hunters.
• Social media is a secondary consideration, if at all.
• Cutting-edge treasure hunting tech, however, is cool, useful, and good.
• Social and economic class contention is fine. Some subplots revolve around it.
• General social change is not a goal for or particularly admired by our characters.
• The underlying tone is that the traditional American business and social structure is acceptable and unlikely to be improved upon.
• Correcting individual injustice and desiring retributive justice for individual bad actors are very important drivers to our characters. Bad guys choose to do wrong, and they deserve what they get when caught.

Storytelling Structure

• Books are all in close third-person POV.
•  POV shifts by chapter only.
• POV should change from one character to another over the course of the book.
• Each chapter is written in one of the three hunters’ points of view. Using POVs other than the three hunters is avoided unless essential to the story.
• Mysteries and puzzles are solvable by the reader from a combination of clues given in the story and reasonably general knowledge.
• Stories set in Ridgeport, the hometown, may have subplots involving local characters; stories set elsewhere likely have subplots involving one-off characters in those locations.

Historical Vignettes

• Every book has at least three historical vignettes.
• These are portrayed as Ben’s “flashes.”
• Every book has two stories running in parallel. One is the main story, and the much shorter historical story that is only shown in glimpses and first-person moments.
• These are the only parts of the book that are not the POV of one of the three hunters.
• These can be handled in various ways, i.e., quick flashes, interior visions of the state of mind, emotions, and decision-making process of historical characters, or occasionally longer action scenes.
• Generally, we keep these to under 1,000 words.
• Historical vignettes (that is, Ben’s “flashes”) will necessarily be in other points of view, that is, the POV of one historical character important to the story.
• All characters used as POVs in historical vignettes must necessarily be known or intuited by Ben.
• All characters used as POVs in historical vignettes, and all action in the vignette must derive from facts, deductions, or inductive and reasonable leaps based on the story so far and what Ben specifically knows at this point in the story.

 Language, Style, and Voice

• The collective noun most often used for the boys in the narrative is “hunters.” We try to avoid using “boys” or the nonregional, Yankee word “guys,” except in specific contexts.
• Possessive “y’all” instead of “you guys.”
• Use “dude” instead of “guy.” In general, the idiom “you guys,” or calling people “guys,” is not very Southern. Avoid unless it is a Yankee talking.
• Operative familiar endearment for each other is “bro.” No use of “buddy,” “bud,” or “chum.” We are not in the 1950s, after all.
• We use modern-day teenage slang, but don’t get too precious with it. Jargon in everyday use shows up. “Sus,” for example.

 Book Structures

• Each book is 35,000 to 60,000 words long.
• Each book is 25 to 30 chapters long (give or take).
• Each chapter comes in at around 1,500 to 3,000 words—twenty to thirty minutes of reading time at a moderate pace.
• Cliffhanger chapter endings abound.
• This tried, true, and ancient five-act plot skeleton underlies each book’s default structure:
  • Heroes encounter and take on a problem to solve
  • Heroes face a reversal (opposition, mistake, lack of information) that makes the problem worse
  • Heroes take on the worsened problem with renewed wisdom and resolve
  • Heroes face a second reversal that they have adapted to overcome
  • Heroes solve the problem

 Parental Appeal
American Treasure Hunter adventures are perfect for parents and homeschool families looking for adventurous, exciting reads that celebrate faith, courage, classical virtues, and American competence without compromising values.

ATH Characters

All the hunters have driver’s licenses, boating licenses, and PADI scuba certification. They know the things a person who lives on the North Carolina coast knows. They are comfortable hiking and camping. They can all fish. They’ve all been hunting. This is a series celebrating American values, not a critique of those values. 

Ben Prescott. 18, the oldest of the hunters. 5’9” Homeschooled. Full name: Benjamin Franklin Prescott. Super smart. Parents pulled him out of school at thirteen to homeschool because he was advancing beyond his peers and even his teachers. Ben often comes across as absentminded because his mind is frequently elsewhere, but he’s got a good heart, and he is a fiercely loyal friend.

 Ben is absolutely, seemingly at all times, motivated by the idea of finding treasure. It’s very much a calling for him, as much as solving difficult crimes was for Holmes. He doesn’t care about the financial gain so much as creating and recreating that moment of discovery. He’s aware of this drive and is able to make fun of himself for it, but only to gain perspective so he can get even better at treasure hunting.

 In appearance, Ben is dark-haired. He is about 5’10”. He’s got a rangy physique, but is not skinny. He is a long-distance runner and is in good shape. Like his father, Ben has startling blue eyes, and 20/10 vision–which makes him a great sharpshooter.

Ben is a sharpshooter and archer. 

He loves classic North Carolina soda pop Cheerwine and prefers to drink it in glass bottles (because it does taste different), but will take the stuff any way he can get it, including cans and cups. 

The North Carolina restaurant Cookout sells Cheerwine.

 Although he is good at them, Ben dislikes chess and other strategy games because they distract him from thinking about the real game he likes to play–namely, treasure hunting.

 While Ben is brilliant, he’s also somewhat eccentric and given to sudden enthusiasm whenever a new chance for learning or a new skill presents itself. His friends have learned that whatever oddball thing he’s obsessing over often leads to the solution to very practical problems—such as where to find treasure. While intellectually gifted, Ben is not an emotionally clueless type of braniac. He trusts his intuition as much as his reason.

 Once he’s pulled together knowledge and hands-on experience in a hunt, he often experiences what his friends call “flashes.” Flashes don’t last for long, but when he was inside one, it could feel like minutes, even hours, to Ben. Usually, they are scenes from the past, particularly from history. 

At one point, his parents had a CT scan done to see if there was anything wrong with Ben’s brain. One doctor had called it “an autoscopic focal state,” and said it was harmless. Ben can come out of a flash whenever he wants. He also maintained a sense of the world around him while experiencing one. After a while, his parents stopped worrying about it and accepted these flashes as just another odd fact about their eccentric son.

Ben is the one likely to devour a book or two on the subject while the hunters are en route to some location, but the other hunters are readers, as well. They just don’t talk about it as much. Ben is mildly inattentive to the finer points of grooming and fashion and might, for instance, wear the same battered heavy wool navy blue pea coat he inherited from his dad in inappropriate situations, although not in North Carolina summer weather. He is generally drawn toward navy blue jackets (in tribute to his dad’s background).

Ben has a mysterious older brother—24 years old—who attended Annapolis like Ben’s father, but now has gone “missing” for two years. His parents are very hush-hush about the whereabouts of Kane (they probably have some idea and won’t say–will resolve eventually). Ben also has a younger sister, Jeanie, who is somewhat resentful of her unusual older brother, who seems to get away with everything and never has to go to school.

 Porter Rockwell. 17. 6’4”. Full name: Porter Talmage Rockwell. Our Latter Day Saints hunter. Porter is a classically handsome kid with brown hair. He was wimpy in middle school and sometimes picked on. Ben and Latch took him in as one of them when they were 11. Both of Porter’s parents were tall athletes at BYU, where they met (basketball and volleyball), but everyone was worried that Porter had somehow inherited the tiny side of both families. With the encouragement and help of Ben and Latch, Porter took up jujitsu and became a black belt at the age of 16. 

Between fifteen and sixteen, Porter began to grow. And grow. Now he’s a big, strong guy, broad-shouldered and athletic. He’s the Ridgeport Raiders’ quarterback, and is being recruited his senior year (the year that all ATH stories take place) by BYU and the smaller North Carolina state schools. Porter is the action guy on the ATH team, dexterous and good at rock climbing, river rafting, etc. With his martial arts skills, he is also very handy in a confrontation with bad guys. Furthermore, Porter is outgoing and good with words. He’s the go-to communicator for the group, and always quick with a joke or wry comment in tense situations.

Porter’s father, Dallen Rockwell, is a large animal veterinarian, and his mother is his office manager and chief veterinary nurse, tending sick animals in the hospital pens outside their office. The Rockwells bought into a financially troubled practice, so they are not well off, but very middle-class. Porter has an older sister (she’s on a Mormon mission in some adventure-filled location) and younger siblings. 

Latch McRae. 17. 5’8’’ Full name: Lachlan Angus McRae. Red hair, freckles. Descended from the old North Carolina Highland Scots of the Cape Fear River Valley and from Louisiana Cajuns on his mother’s side. A natural redhead with curly hair (he is very Scots-Irish in appearance), he’s nevertheless usually deeply tanned from being outside so much. Also frequently smudged with automotive grease. His father worked with Ben’s dad, Hamish Prescott, in the service as a master sergeant Marine Raider and is still in the Marines and currently deployed far away. Latch, his mother, and his five younger sisters live in a crowded but happy little house in town. They are very much working class. His mother, Jessica McRae, is an emergency room nurse (which sometimes comes in handy). Latch often needs to be home to keep an eye on his younger sisters. He’s also the handyman in the house. 

Latch is very straightforward—which some mistake for dumb. That he ain’t. He is fiercely loyal to Ben and Porter. He’s a human bulldog.

 Latch is a magician with anything mechanical and cool. ATVs. Scuba gear. Parachutes. Cameras. He’s also good with computers and electronics (though a hardware guy, not a hacker or programmer). A portion of the hunter’s tobacco barn is a workshop filled with Latch’s tools. He loves classic cars and boats.

 Latch has a soft spot for animals. He takes in wounded animals, and his backyard is a menagerie of the lame and halt he has nursed back to health. 

Latch also listens to rap music constantly, and plays it rather loudly in his truck (an F-150 V-8 with four wheel drive and a lift kit with big tires and a muffler cut-out). He reveres Krush WRD, an emo rapper who died young. Ben and Porter kid Latch about how often “new” Krush WRD cuts drop, even though Krush has been dead for years.

We do not put Krush lyrics, or any rap lyrics, in the books. 

Ben and Latch have known each other since they were small because their fathers are fast friends. The two had many adventures together, building rafts and forts and exploring the local woods and Ridgeport’s various neighborhoods—often places they maybe shouldn’t have gone, such as rooftops and culverts. When Porter moved to town when they all started middle school, Latch and Ben took him into their brotherhood, and they eventually formed a tight three.

The Girlfriends

Piper Hayes. Ben’s girlfriend is Piper Hayes, the prettiest girl at Ridgeport High School. (Ben is aware of what goes on in Ridgeport High because he cares about Piper and his friends who go there. Even though he doesn’t attend there, he’s generally known at the town high school.) Piper is plucky. She is effortlessly popular at school. Many wonder what Piper is doing with such an oddball as Ben Prescott. Ben, who is seemingly indifferent to her looks, finds her soulful and particularly likes her quick wit and aplomb in difficult situations. She gets his offbeat sense of humor. Piper is, in general, the leader of the girls who hang with the hunters. She is a total theater girl in the old school sense (i.e., a lover of stage and show, not a goth nightmare), starring in all the senior plays this year, and is a regular player at the Ridgeport Community Theatre. She can be called upon when acting skills or theater craft are useful. Ben and Piper attend football games together where they watch Porter Rockwell QB the Ridgeport Raiders.

Maren Davis. Porter’s girlfriend is a fellow LDS girl, Maren Davis. Maren is good friends with Piper Hayes. She is considered the friendliest girl in school by most. She is soulful and a big reader of all manner of fiction. She is a romantic at heart. She is the tallest of the girls and is the most athletic. Porter and Maren attend early morning seminary classes at the LDS chapel, and Maren is the incoming seminary president.

 Sloane Rensselaer. Sloane, the richest girl in town, has a big crush on Latch, who she views as a romantic outsider, a James Dean figure. Sloane’s parents are not super happy about this, however. Latch is slightly befuddled by the whole thing, but he thinks Sloane is cool, and he greatly admires her car, which is a vintage Shelby GT500. (A $200,000 car.) He basically consented to be her boyfriend so they can ride around in it, but he’s come to really adore Sloane in his own way. Latch maintains Rensselaer’s fleet of personal vehicles, and he and Sloane met when he had to rescue her when she got stranded driving on sand on the beach. Sloane is Ben Prescott’s first cousin. Her mother is Ben’s mother’s sister.

 Others

Austin Meekins. The  ATH podcast producer. He usually doesn’t come on the adventures, but can appear when needed. He does the editing and social media for the podcast and answers emails. He’s playfully ironic and makes jokes. Knows the memes. Austin’s parents are of an American Indian-rural black heritage. Beau Meekins and his wife are members of the Halawi-Saponi Tribe of North Carolina, and grew up in Hollister, NC. Austin is Halawi-Saponi (looks black, but also American Indian in complexion). Austin is short. Pretty strong from constantly having to work in his dad’s store putting together bikes and lawnmowers, and such (tasks he dislikes). Austin is 16, a high school junior—a year behind the hunters.

Hamish Prescott. Ben’s father runs a marine salvage company that performs marine construction and demolition, but also specializes in retrieving valuable wrecks and archaeological treasures in difficult situations. He was a captain in the U.S. Navy before, commanding an amphibious assault ship, which is where he honed his maritime skills. This was also where he met Angus McRae, Latch’s father. 

Peg Prescott. Ben’s mother is from an old North Carolina family, the Marlboros, that’s been prominent since Revolutionary War times, when they were once persecuted as original members of the Regulators. A later ancestor was a signer of the Mecklenburg Declaration, a sort of pre-Declaration of Independence in 1775. The Marlboros fell on hard time and Madelaine “Peg” Prescott is not rich. She did, however, inherit Ridgeport’s Marlboro Mansion, where Ben was raised. It’s a huge old ramshackle affair, very cool and ancient, but difficult to keep up even for Ben’s father, Ham Prescott, whose business goes through boom and bust cycles. Things are always breaking and in need of repair in the house. Peg Prescott is, incidentally, the sister to the mother of the on-again, off-again girlfriend of Ben’s friend, Latch McRae. Meg’s younger sister, Maude—who married very well in Buck Rensselaer—is the wealthiest woman in Ridgeport. Yet she resents her sister very much for getting the old Manse instead of her.

Angus McRae. Angus McRae was a Marine Raider often aboard Ham Prescott’s ship for missions. Under fire, both men saved one another’s lives. Gunny McRae is now Master Gunnery Sergeant McRae. He works out of MARSOC at Camp LeJeune. Every year, Angus and his family go to the Highland Games at Grandfather Mountain, where Gunny holds several records in caber tossing for triple 12 o’clocks. For the past couple of years, Latch has competed in Highland wrestling matches, which can be pretty brutal.

Buck Rensselaer. Buck Rensselaer, Sloane’s father, knows that Latch is the best mechanic in town, and he employs him part-time to take care of his vintage vehicle collection and many other cool man-toys. Buck treats Latch like a son so long as Sloane isn’t around. Then he can get testy. He’s more worried about what Sloane might pull than Latch, however. Buck has just about every gadget imaginable and will usually loan stuff to Latch with few questions asked because he trusts him. This is where the ATH heroes get a lot of their cool, specialized equipment when needed.

Bad Guys

The Alignment. A continuing nemesis. Their mission: Wipe out history that contradicts the “narrative,” especially if it presents America in a good light. Their most effective agent is the brilliant and ruthless Forigo—a guy in his twenties—who becomes Ben’s particular nemesis. The Alignment’s motto is “Justice through Alignment.” Kane, Ben’s older brother, is on a secret mission to infiltrate and bring down the Alignment.

Forigo. A man in his mid-twenties from the French-speaking section of Switzerland. Forigo is a gaunt fellow with pasty skin and black hair. His trademark look is wearing all black clothing. Latch and Porter call him the “French vampire” even though they know he’s Swiss. This infuriates Forigo, who wants to be thought of as a Swiss internationalist.  Forigo is a recurring villain throughout the books. He is extremely clever, dedicated to the Alignment’s “cause,” and as unrelenting as our hunters. 

Martin Keezler. Marty Keezler is a more earthy and greedy scourge than Forigo. He’s originally from Boston and has an attitude about Southerners being lazy and uneducated. He’s a former employee and now an unscrupulous rival to Ben’s father. He makes his employees call him captain. He’s always been a bully toward Ben, whom he calls “Benjy boy,” and is not above releasing his Boston goons (his cousins, who have done prison time) to perform mayhem on the hunters. His boat is The Yankee Darling.

 Setting

 Ridgeport, North Carolina

Ridgeport is a fictional port town on North Carolina’s Albemarle Sound near the northern portion of the Outer Banks. The area is sometimes called the Inner Banks, but only by outsiders. Ridgeport is located where the Kishetank River (fictional) flows into the Albemarle Sound.

It’s a sleepy port town about the size of Elizabeth City. Population 30,000. This makes it large enough to warrant a junior college (where Ben occasionally studies now), a regional airport, and some manufacturing, as well as a lot of shipping and fishing businesses. It’s about a 45-minute drive across the sound to Kitty Hawk and Kill Devil Hills, as well as the beaches of Corolla.

Ridgeport is also pre-Revolution old with tons of history. Pirates galore. Much Civil War history. The Wright Brothers hung out in Ridgeport for a while as they were scouting for spots to launch their flyer on the Outer Banks. And off the coast are many WW II German sub wrecks that deep divers often explore (and sometimes loot). The waters off the Outer Banks aren’t called the Graveyard of the Atlantic for nothing.

The Barn 

On Ben’s family’s land, there’s an old tobacco-drying barn that sat unused for decades. It’s pretty large (The Manse used to be the center of a thriving plantation) and has three stories—a dirt main floor, a loft, and a small storage area on top. In the big lower area is space enough to park a car, hang out for fun, develop items that might be useful, or modify a vehicle, etc. There’s an overhanging tin roof porch ribbon outside where even more stuff can happen. The Barn also has a makeshift ping-pong table, foosball, and a small indoor ax and knife-throwing area. There’s a basement root cellar accessible by a hidden trap door that is now Latch’s “secret” workshop, where he stores and locks away his tools and works on devices-in-progress.

Upstairs is the meeting area with a big table. It is made from two World War II liberty ship hatch covers strapped together. You can tell because there is a cleat on either end.

The Map Room

There are plenty of eclectic chairs where discussions are had, plans are made, maps are rolled out, etc. Lots of shelves, map racks, and brick-a-brac around here, too. The YouTube studio is also located in the loft near the meeting area. There’s a third extra floor that is a locked-off section called the “vault,” where all sorts of cool stuff and historical research material can be found.  

Ridgeport Museum of American Heritage

Ridgeport has an eclectic museum in a historical building (it used to be the Royal Tax Collector’s house) to which the hunters hand over many of their discoveries. It also has a very good historical library. The old lighthouse cupola has a small study carrel. Ben has spent many happy hours up there doing research for his father. The museum director, Dr. Morris Weatherford, can often serve as an area expert when they need items and documents evaluated for authenticity, or historic context for stuff explained, etc. He was a history professor at East Carolina University (ECU) for years, and has many academic and museum contacts in the region who might be useful. Weatherford is a friend of Ham Prescott, Ben’s dad.

The Claw

Pennyhook Bay is an elliptical inlet at the tip of a peninsula in the Albemarle Sound, formed where Pennyhook Creek flows in. The Claw is long and curled–maybe a tenth of a mile in all, but no more than fifty feet across in any one spot. The beach on either side is littered with driftwood, with firepits dug into the sand and spots to pull up jet skis. Shallow waves roll in on the sound-facing side, stirring the water and producing an ocean-like feel.

 The Claw is their place for local teens to gather—bonfires at night, bottle rocket fights in summer, and just enough space for stolen kisses or dares run under starlight. It’s 30 minutes from Ridgeport by car (although four-wheel drive is recommended), and about 45 minutes from the North Kittyhawk on the Outer Banks, so this is a spot where Outer Banks kids come to mingle with the Inner Banks kids. Mostly everyone gets along, but sometimes sparks fly.

Various Treasure Hunting Tech Used

Detectors

• Garrett Sea Hunter Underwater Metal Detector
• Deepseeker pulse induction metal detector
• Manticore VLF underground mapping detector
• ResQLink 400 PLB (personal location beacon)

From Ham Prescott’s Explosives Supplies

• Visco fuse, an exactly timed waterproofed fuse (btw this is not the same as det cord, which has to be used with a license). You use different grades of this according to the timing you want.
• Quickmatch fuse, a superfast burning, waterproof fuse
• MJM ring-igniter, you can clip the fuse into this, pull the ring, and it ignites the fuse

Borrowed from Buck Rensselaer

• Honda FourTrax Rancher ATV four-wheeler with bucket loader and winch
• Aluminum ramp for offloading four-wheeler from truck bed
• Scuba tanks and gear  (Buck has a compression pump for refills, too)

Borrowed from Rockwell Veterinary Clinic

Pop’n’Work shelter, 8x8. Used by Porter’s father for treating downed large animals in fields. These are those greenish-yellow tents you see utilities workers pop up over job sites when it rains or snows. Perfect for stretching over treasure digs. 

Hunters’ Personal Gear

• Come-along ratcheted hoist
• Tow straps
• Digging and cutting tools
• Flashlights, headlamps
• Surfboards

Austin’s AV Equipment

• GoPro in waterproof case
• Drone with camera
• Three-camera vlog setup
• Portable lavalier microphones

Hunter Vehicles

• Latch: 2008 V8 F-150 Pickup, lifted
• Porter: Dodge Ram Pickup, green
• Ben: Subaru Outback, older model, faded blue and gray two-tone.
• Piper: Jeep Grand Cherokee wagon 
• Sloane: 1968 Shelby Mustang GTO convertible, white with turquoise stripes 
• Captain Hamish Prescott: Reclaimer, his main boat. Hamish runs a “fleet” of five other boats of various uses for his business

Series author Andrew M. Dare

Andrew M. Dare is the creator of the American Treasure Hunters series. He’s an adventurer and world traveler who has climbed in Nepal, surfed the Shipstern boomers of Australia, and sailed the Roaring Forties solo from Fremantle to Patagonia. Dare is a native of North Carolina, where he owns an Outer Banks kite shop and lives in a historic cabin in the dunes near Nags Harbor with his dog, Gulliver.

 Sort of.

We present Dare as a 30-something aspirational version of “The World’s Most Interesting Man.” We have even built a social media presence around him. We do this with a tongue-in-cheek attitude, and older teens and adults will be able to figure out quickly that he is not real. Or rather, that Andrew M. Dare is the personification of their own adventurous future self.

Nevertheless, we present our author’s “life,” with full disclosure to parents that Dare is a pseudonymous “house author,” in the tradition of Franklin W. Dixon of Hardy Boys fame.