Great George's Ghost! The Ghost Who Haunted the Capitol by Steve Brezenoff

"Come on, Sam," I said. "We're not superheroes or something. We're just going on a class trip."

"Yeah," Cat added. "it's not like there's always a major crime wave wherever we go on a class trip."

Gum frowned. "Yeah there is," he said.

"Yeah, said Sam. "Name one trip we've been on that didn't involve us busting some crook or scoundrel or vandal or punk?"

Sam was right. For us, field trips meant fighting crime.

Egg (Edward G. Garrison) and his sixth-grade buddies expect to see the usual sights on their field trip to Washington, D.C--the Capitol, the Washington Monument--but they really don't expect to see the ghost of George Washington!

It all begins at Union Station. The kids are just piling off their train when the crowd begins to run and scream that they are seeing a ghost--the ghost of our first president. The scene is chaos, Some sort of flyers litter the grand lobby and people are running away from the ghost, toward the ghost, and every direction in between. Egg is disappointed that the mysterious figure is gone before he can snap a photo with his trusty camera. But at the hotel, there's another appearance of the phantasm, suddenly appearing in Sam and Cat's room. But this time Egg is there with his always at-hand camera, and he catches their pesky classmate, Anton Gutman, in the act. But how could Anton have managed to impersonate George's ghost at the station?

And the next day, as the kids make the rounds, there are whispers about the ghost everywhere they go, and all the tourists seem to have suddenly acquired fancy new cameras to try to catch a telltale snapshot of Washington's spirit. At the Washington Monument, Egg finally manages to get his own shots of the mystery phantasm, but the figure of the supposed ghost appears only as a bright blur. Even the down-to-earth Gum is beginning to believe in ghosts.

But Egg is suspicious. It's an interesting coincidence that those flyers scattered all over Union Station were advertising a big weekend sale on cameras at Washington's Photographs just at the time when the photo op of the century was making cameo appearances all around the nation's capital. Egg knows why the ghost of George is walking. Now all he has to do is explain what--or who--the presidential ghost really is.

Steve Brezenoff's The Ghost Who Haunted the Capitol (Field Trip Mysteries) (Stone Arch Books, 2011) has those gumshoes of the school bus on the job in a brand-new installment of his beginning chapter book series, Field Trip Mysteries. C. B. Canga's classy full-color illustrations catch the local color to add much in the way of pizazz to the design of this appealing group of young sleuth mystery tales that should be just right for readers who have ripped through Ron Roy's The A to Z Mysteries (for more D.C. suspense, see Roy's White House White-Out (A to Z Mysteries Super Edition, No. 3.) Or, to catch the current zombie wave, pair the Field Trip sleuths' The Zombie That Visited New Orleans (Field Trip Mysteries) with Ron Roy's The Zombie Zone (A to Z Mysteries) for a lot of detective fun way down yonder in New Orleans.

D. C. Holiday: The Great White House Breakout by Helen Thomas

I am Sam.

My mom and dad work at home. I have to be careful not to bother them when I play.

We moved to Washington, D.C, because of my mom's new job.

She is President of the United States, and my dad is First Guy.

Being the First Kid in the White House has its perks, all right. Sam and his cat Warren gets to bounce on the bed in Lincoln's Bedroom, swim in the President's pool, and visit his mom in the Oval Office--the one with the cool red phone, The Button on the desk, and a wastebasket labelled POTUS. And then there is his special friend Leonard, a recently retired NASA lab rat who is the brains behind Sam's secret plan, a plan to take it on the lam and see the real Washington from the bottom up.

Constantly nannied by Secret Service agents equipped with phones in their ears and the latest electronic surveillance equipment at their disposal, Sam is a virtual prisoner in the White House compound. But the chance for the great escape comes when the Queen of England arrives for the grand tour and is escorted to the Dining Room for a festive state dinner. Leonard distracts everyone's attention by making a dash down the center of the banquet table, and amid the shrieks of the affronted guests, Sam and Warren sneak out into the streets of Washington.

At first the three escapees have a wonderful time, playing baseball all night, hanging out at the Spy Museum, watching the crowd from atop the Spirit of St. Louis in the Air and Space Museum, deciphering the handwriting in their personal copy of the Constitution, and looking for pirates in the Tidal Basin. When it grows dark and chilly, Sam, Warren, and Leonard curl up in a very big "nice man's lap" inside the Lincoln Memorial.

The next morning the newspapers' headlines scream "EXTRA! SAM STILL MISSING! NATIONAL ARCHIVES DOCUMENTS DISAPPEAR! Sam realizes that he misses his mom more than he expected, and it's up to Leonard the NASA genius to figure out a way to get Sam back to where he belongs.

Veteran White House reporter Helen Thomas takes a light-hearted look at her favorite beat in her brand-new The Great White House Breakout. Chip Bok's comic illustrations poke gentle fun at White House conventions while building a bit of sympathy for Sam, who, home at last, finally gets his greatest wish, a just-for-Sam supper of burgers and pie with his mom and dad in the newly decorated First Family Dining Room in their private living quarters.

The Winter Soldiers: Remember Valley Forge by Thomas B. Allen

"I think the game is pretty near up.

I am now convinced, beyond a doubt that unless some great and capital change suddenly takes place . . . this Army must inevitably be reduced to one or other of these things. Starve, dissolve, or disperse in order to obtain subsistence in the best manner they can.... "

The words of General George Washington in December of 1776 were frank, devoid of the spin required of the modern military. Despite all that has been written and spoken about life in the winter quarters of Valley Forge, it seems that for those on the ground it was worse than most Americans realize. Not only were there near starvation, bloody bare footprints in the snow, and snow and sleet falling on a barely clad group of untrained civilian-soldiers, but the Continental Army went unsupported by perhaps the majority of their fellow citizens, many of whom were engaged in selling foodstuffs, horses, and munitions to the British forces living in relative luxury and wooing the teenaged beauties of the newly captured capital of Philadelphia.

How Washington, with his shrewd grasp of the role of battlefield terrain, managed to pull his weakened army together to prevail at the Battle of Trenton becomes a suspenseful narrative in Thomas Allen's Remember Valley Forge: Patriots, Tories, and Redcoats Tell Their Stories (Remember Series). Master of field position though he was, Washington faced other foes besides the Redcoats and their powerful Tory supporters--primarily the calendar and its corollary, the weather. Enlistments for most of his forces were for only six months, and most of these were set to run out on January 1, 1777, and with their state militias shrinking before their eyes, officers had only to resign their commissions to be legally free to return to their homes as well.

Despite his apparent despair, however, Washington somehow rallied his own will, and with the victory at Trenton and the retaking of Philadelpha, support from his own Congress and countrymen slowly rallied as well. Initially bound to a strong code of honor, Washington eventually gave in to reality and posted harsh penalties for deserters and thieves among the ranks and issued orders for his starving foragers to confiscate horses, wagons, food, and clothing and rustle livestock as needed from the civilian populations. Washington also successfully pursued his "secret war" through a network of spies and double agents that rival KGB/CIA legends, although he was outmaneuvered by one of the former Tory Philadelphia beauties, Peggy Shippen, who managed to marry General Benedict Arnold and "turn" him to become perhaps the most notorious turncoat spy of the war.

Proud but not jealous of his primacy, Washington chose to share leadership with European sympathizers such as Baron Frederic Wilhelm von Steuben, whose close-order drilling transformed the army, and the Marquis de Lafayette, among others, who took command in key skirmishes as the Continental Army drove the British back toward New York. With the American victories at Monmouth and Springfield, New Jersey, the British made the fatal decision to split their forces and attempt to defeat Washington by attacking from the south as well as from the north, a strategy which ultimately cost them the defeat at Yorktown, where Cornwallis' army was cut off from English naval support by French victories at sea. Although the peace was several years in coming, the revolutionary army had virtually secured the liberty they sought.

With all the caveats of history around the early leadership of Washington, author Allen makes the case that, militarily at least, he was the man for the job. It was Captain "Light Horse" Harry Lee, veteran of Valley Forge, who penned the words which have always defined General George Washington for history: "First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen." Ironically, of course, Light Horse Harry Lee went on to father Robert E. Lee, General of the Army of the Confederacy. But that, as we say, is a story for another day--and the matter of many another book.

The latest in National Geographic's Remember series, Remember Valley Forge: Patriots, Tories, and Redcoats Tell Their Stories (Remember Series). displays the scholarly supportive materials associated with its publisher--abundant photographs and prints of period paintings, an extensive timeline of both the Revolutionary War and the Valley Forge encampment, maps, "Selected Sources," "Quote Sources," "Selected Postscripts," and an index.