It's Not Over Until the Canary Sings: Pigeon P. I. by Meg McLaren

BUSINESS WAS SLOW, JUST THE WAY I LIKED IT.

MY PARTNER STANLEY HAD SKIPPED TOWN A WHILE BACK, SO I'D DECIDED TO TAKE THINGS EASY.

Murray McMurray, Pigeon Private Eye, is taking a break from the gumshoe business since his sidekick Stanley flew the coop, loafing around on the street corner and letting the local cops do the leg work.

But there's a tiny tipster shadowing the retired P.I., a little yellow canary named Vee, telling a sad story of a dastardly avian abduction. Her feathered friends had been bird-napped right out of their cages, and she alone has flown to tell the tale. She begs Murray to take the case, but despite the plaintive photos of her missing pals on the front of milk cartons, Private Eye Murray demurs.

But then little Vee goes missing as well, The police chief is too distracted rounding up dropped donuts to investigate a missing chick. But Murray's a veteran P. I. with a beak for incriminating evidence.

Word on the wire was that birds had been going missing all over.

All the tweets from the street say that the perps are after plumage, and Murray's trained eyes soon spot a trail of tiny feathers.

The evidence pointed to the Red Herring Bar and Grill (next door to Bird Bath and Beyond).

Is the hard-boiled sleuth about to crack the case as he tracks down the evil plumage-hoarding perp in his lair, or will the criminal capo cook his goose? In Meg McLaren's forthcoming Pigeon P.I. (Houghton Mifflin Clarion, 2017), the author takes gleeful full charge of a passel of crime noir tropes with a flock of puns and wordplay that will particularly please older primary grade readers familiar with detective lingo. And in her artwork McLaren provides plenty of visual humor to keep youngsters peering at the pages, beginning with her endpapers with allusions to crime novels about Sherstork Holmes, Duck Tracy, and Monsieur Parrot' to her storefront birdhouse businesses such as Legal Eagles and Mockingbird's Joke Shop. This one will be great fun for adults who will find the parody of the Private Eye paradigm a egg-cellent incentive to read this one aloud.