Thank you NetGalley and Dover Publications for the opportunity to read "Hunting For Hidden Gold" in exchange for my honest opinion.

This is the 5th book in The Hardy Boys mystery books. Mr. Dixon crafted a timeless mystery that young people have been reading for decades.

Brothers Frank and Joe Hardy while still in high school have already solved some big cases - The Tower Treasure, The House on the Cliff, The Secret of the Old Mill and most recently The Missing Chums. They are following in the footsteps of their Internationally famous detective father Fenton Hardy.

The formidable Aunt Gertrude - their maiden aunt is still staying with the family. Still expressing her belief that everything is doom and gloom and freely dispensing her opinion on everything.

Her prophecy that the boys would get in trouble if they went ice skating comes true when a sudden blizzard happens. They meet an old miner named Jadbury Wilson whose cabin is damaged in the storm. He tells them that he was mining out west in Nevada with his partners Bill & Jack Coulson and Bart Dawson . Their stake was taken away by robbers. They found gold in Montana - they had 4 bags of gold nuggets and gold dust. Dawson was supposed to hide it to keep it away from robbers but Jadbury is convinced that he stole the gold.

Fenton has been injured on his current case and telegrams for the boys to join him at a mining camp in Montana. Thus starts another tense adventure for the boys. They arrive in Chicago where they are supposed to change trains. A mysterious Mr. Hopkins appears and tells them that their father sent him to get them to the train station from the hotel they were staying at overnight. Only when they are on the train do they learn that they are heading to Indianapolis instead of Montana. They are picked up by a nice young man in a flashy car who offers to take them to another train station where they wouldn't have to wait 5 hours for a train. The boys realize they are in trouble when he turns off the main road and onto a deserted road.

Realizing that someone doesn't want them to arrive in Lucky Bottoms, they come up with a simple disguise and decide to board the train separately which turns out to be a good idea as someone was watching the station.

The boys are reunited with their father at Hank Shale's cabin where they learn more about the case that their father was working on. They hear a slightly different story than the one old Jadbury told.

This book is exciting with an outlaw named Black Pepper, the boys getting lost, being attacked by Timberwolves, mine cave-ins, a winter storm, being held up by outlaws - and finding the hidden gold. With Black Pepper and his outlaw gang in jail, the boys can return the gold to Dawson who for all these years thought that Jadbury was dead like one of the Coulson brothers. But now they will be able to split the money and make life a little easier for Jadbury who the boys felt sorry for and left staying at their house with Mrs. Hardy and Aunt Gertrude.

It was such a treat to read this book which I found just as interesting and exciting to read as I did back in elementary school. It's definitely a timeless classic that everyone should read.

Do the books in the series get a bit repetitive as the series goes along? Well, sure. But, these books were fun reads for me as a middle grader in the 60's, and I was curious to see how they held up. They are straightforward tales of adventure and derring-do, but perhaps more importantly, in style and content they have aged fairly well. Not exactly progressive mind you, but not cringeworthy either. I don't think I'd offer a young reader a steady diet drawn from the complete series, but a couple of these "boy's own" style tales would sit well on the family shelf.