The Riddle of Riverside Park

By Astone Zulu

Every park has a secret. Every secret has a keeper. And every keeper is waiting for someone brave enough to ask the right questions. Riverside Park is the heart of Eastbrook the place where every birthday party, summer fair, baseball game, and autumn evening happens. It is the one thing the town has always had. But when strange things begin happening after dark tools going missing, flowerbeds dug up, shadows on the security cameras the park commission threatens to close it forever. Twelve-year-old Cora Bennett, daughter of the parks director, refuses to let that happen. When she discovers a precise, freshly carved symbol on the underside of the old stone bridge, Cora realizes this is no ordinary mystery. The symbol is a compass arrow pointing north and north leads to another symbol, and another, forming a coded trail that someone has left deliberately through the park. But who? And why? With her quick-witted best friend Danny, who writes everything down and never goes anywhere without snacks, and the fiercely logical Priya, whose lifelong obsession with codes and ciphers turns out to be exactly the right skill at exactly the right moment, Cora begins to follow the trail. It leads them to the ancient oak grove at the park's heart and to Leo, a boy who has been sneaking into the park alone at night for weeks, searching for the same thing. Leo's grandfather was James Whitmore, the park's beloved groundskeeper for fifty-two years. Before he died, Mr. Whitmore built something extraordinary: a hidden system of riddles and secret compartments designed to protect Riverside Park from exactly the kind of danger it now faces. Deep in tree four of the oak grove is a tin box. Inside that box are documents that could save everything. But someone else wants those documents destroyed. With the park commission meeting in six days and a desperate criminal willing to threaten four children to protect his scheme, the Riverside Four must use every skill they have logic, courage, teamwork, and one very well-timed sprinkler system to solve the riddle before the park is lost forever. A thrilling adventure about friendship, courage, community, and the extraordinary things ordinary children can do when they pay attention to the world around them.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GRRMDZXN
• ISBN13: 9798248731398
• Release Date: February 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 92 Pages
• Weight: 0.52 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 8.5" x 11.0"