The Thirteenth Pearl
book by Carolyn Keene
The Thirteenth Pearl is the fifty-sixth volume in the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories series. It was first published in 1979 under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene. The actual author was ghostwriter Harriet Stratemeyer Adams. The Thirteenth Pearl is the end of the original 56-book series published by Grosset & Dunlap. Subsequent volumes were published by Simon & Schuster.
Plot summary
Nancy Drew is asked to locate a missing pearl that is unusual, but very valuable. She soon learns that dangerous people are responsible for the theft. They begin harassing her at home and it intensifies when Nancy and her father go to Japan. They finally kidnap her and her boyfriend, Ned when they return to River Heights.
Through her clever sleuthing, Nancy is able to penetrate the rites of a pearl-worshipping cult, but some are far from devotional, and she uncovers underhanded dealings of certain employees of World Wide Gems, Inc., an international jewelry company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan.
“The Thirteenth Pearl” enters the record as book by Carolyn Keene. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Thirteenth, Pearl and book can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“The Thirteenth Pearl” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Thirteenth, Pearl and book provides the most credible route into that argument.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7768863. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1979.
Later fame can flatten the distinction between original context, subsequent adaptation and institutional collecting history. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Thirteenth Pearl” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.