The main characters
PEN PICTURES

​Caroline Booker

​Caroline is a headstrong girl who can be rather impatient, especially with her friends Peter and Eddie. She is keen to study medicine later in life, following her mother Susan who is a paramedic at Exeter hospital.  She is very close to her father, PC Stephen Booker the local policeman, though she sometimes finds his insistence on always obeying rules rather tiresome.  She works hard at school. In Burning Ivory, she discovered a natural gift for drone flying and she now has a surveillance drone of her own.

​Peter Vanstone

​Peter is a quiet, deep thinking boy, though he can be easily annoyed if he thinks his friend Caroline is trying to boss him around.  Helping his father, Tom Vanstone a town fisherman, has made him self-reliant and taught him to love and respect the sea.  He likes nothing better than spending an early morning checking his lobster pots in Peter Pan 2, their fishing boat.  (Their first boat, Peter Pan, was lost in Summer Storm.) Peter is the ‘ideas-person’ of the three children.  Peter’s mother, Sally, is a teaching assistant.  She would love to have a daughter but the family finds it hard to make ends meet.  The Vanstones have a collie, Bud, who is brave and very gifted.  In One of Our Beavers Is Missing it’s discovered that he is a rare human-speaker.

​Eddie Carter

​Eddie lives with his mother Debbie Carter.  His father Danny, a wildlife conservationist, is away in Africa for most of the year and Eddie misses him terribly, especially after Danny was kidnapped by ivory poachers in Burning Ivory. Sometimes Eddie feels left out of things when Peter and Caroline make their plans.  However, Eddie is full of surprises.  He is fast becoming an expert chef, he showed particular talent in sewing a cloak for Sir Walter Raleigh in The Times of Their Lives, and when danger threatens, although Eddie is by nature sensitive and quite nervous, he always responds well and bravely to emergencies.

​Gwen Watson

Gwen is a retired civil servant who, it is rumoured, used to be a senior member of the UK security services. She lives in a large house overlooking Budleigh Beach. She never speaks of any family and no one has ever been brave enough to ask her. She is a tall lady with great presence, is physically very resilient and has a soft spot for the three children. Gwen often disappears on secret business to her flat in Pimlico. She still has contacts and influence with central government and has influential friends all over the world.

​Agent Smith

​Nobody knows his real name.  He is a spook and a former colleague of Gwen.  He is especially useful in organising transport and ‘armed back-up’.  He is very strong.

​Mrs June Davis Ojoto

​As a newly qualified teacher, (ultra keen but accident prone) Miss Davis had a big problem with field trips.  In her first field trip (The Times of Their Lives), Caroline, Peter, Eddie and Bud fell through a history portal into the sixteenth century.  Her second (Burning Ivory) resulted in her accompanying the children to Uganda to rescue Eddie’s father!  There she met and married Christopher Ojoto, a very tall (Miss Davis is quite short) and handsome Ugandan balloon pilot, minister’s son and all-round action hero.

​Guy Arthur Johnson

​Guy is Cockney crook from Leytonstone, trying to go straight.  As Doris, his long-suffering widowed mother explained to him, their family has always been on the wrong side of the law.  Crime has been a family business for centuries.  His long-suffering wife Daphne has insisted he goes straight and Guy is really trying.  Dave and Jack his criminal colleagues from Summer Storm are always trying to tempt Guy back into crime but with no success.  His wife and mother keep him on the rails. Guy is a giant of a man with long black greasy hair and a terrifying scar all the way down his face.  He looks very frightening as a crook should, but he has a soft spot for the children and for Bud too. He would like children of his own just as soon as he can find honest employment.

​Adam Benton

​Adam is the town mayor.  He has a military background, speaks quite loudly and likes yoga and jogging in the early morning to keep fit.  He is a very good organiser.

Bud

Bud is Peter’s black and white collie.  Though originally from the Welsh hills, he has lived all his adult life in Devon and so his bark no longer has any trace of Welsh accent.  Bud is brave and wise, and devoted to Peter.  In The Times of Their Lives, he slipped accidentally into the 16th century; in Burning Ivory he parachuted into Africa; and in One of Our Beavers Is Missing we learn that he has the very rare talent of understanding human speech.  An amazing dog indeed!