After losing their father in the Boer War, orphaned brothers Harry and Davy must leave their home in Scotland to live with their grandmother and cantankerous grandfather in Nova Scotia. The boys want nothing more than a pet dog, but their grandfather refuses to get them one. Then, when the brothers find an abandoned baby, they decide to keep it – but the foundling may not have been abandoned after all.

Set in the eighteenth century, Moonfleet is about John Mohune, a young orphan who is sent to the Dorset village of Moonfleet to stay with an old friend of his mother's, Jeremy Fox. Fox is a morally ambiguous character, an elegant gentleman involved with smugglers and pirates.

A boy accidentally shoots a friend with a gun he found in the rubble of a destroyed building. The gun turns out to be a clue in a ten-year-old murder case.