The Secret of the Forgotten City is the fifty-second volume in the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories

Nancy Drew Mystery Stories

The Nancy Drew Mystery Stories was the long-running "main" Nancy Drew series, published between 1930 and 2003. Initially, titles were published by Grosset & Dunlap, but with #57 publication switched to Simon & Schuster. Most people consider these first 56 to be the original series and consider the...

 series. It was first published in 1975 under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene

Carolyn Keene

Carolyn Keene is the pseudonym of the authors of the Nancy Drew mystery stories and The Dana Girls mystery stories, both produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate...

. The actual author was ghostwriter Harriet Stratemeyer Adams

Harriet Adams

Harriet Stratemeyer Adams was an American juvenile mystery novelist and publisher who authored some 200 books over her literary career. She wrote many books in the Nancy Drew series and a few in the Hardy Boys series...

.

Plot

Nancy and her friends plan to join a dig sponsored by two colleges to hunt for a treasure hidden in a city now buried under the Nevada desert. Before she starts, the young sleuth receives an ancient stone tablet with petroglyph

Petroglyph

Petroglyphs are pictogram and logogram images created by removing part of a rock surface by incising, picking, carving, and abrading. Outside North America, scholars often use terms such as "carving", "engraving", or other descriptions of the technique to refer to such images...

s on it. A thief also wants the treasure.