Not What It Seems! The Thief Knot: A Greenglass House Story by Kate Milford

Marzana and Nialla are dissatisfied. Desperate for some excitement, they had lurked at a sidewalk table with their coffees, surveilling what they earnestly hoped was a robbery about to take place inside the jewelry store. Instead, it appeared to be the purchase of a surprise engagement ring for a happy young couple.

So the guy had looked a bit shifty. A high percentage of who lived within the city-within-the-city of Nagspeake called the Liberty were shifty--or had been to one degree or another in a previous life," thought Marzana.

"I should have known it was nothing...because... we live in the Liberty, and this is the place where nothing happens."

The neighborhood of the Liberty should be an intriguing environment, being the sanctuary city of former seafaring smugglers. And when talk spreads of the kidnapping of ten-year-old Peony Hyde, and Marzana's sometimes investigator parents receive a copy of the ransom note delivered by the mysterious Emmett, who brought up the possible involvement of someone called "Snakebird," Marzana seizes on solving the case as her remedy for ennui. With Nialla as co-sleuth, she organizes a group to help in their investigations, even calling their friend Milo, resident of the peculiar Greenglass House, where they had been previously involved in a puzzling Christmas enigma, for advice.

Marzana and Nialla recruit fans of fantasy fiction from Lucky's bookstore--Emilia, privy to many secrets of their school's historic building, Ciro, a self-declared born camoufleur, J. J., a magician, and Milo's offering, Meddie, a sometimes visible ghost resident at Greenglass House whose talents including invisibility, walking through walls, and supernatural sight and hearing. When the crew of six discover that their substitute math teacher is the great nephew of Andrew Cormorant, called "the Snakebird," they suspect that the kidnapped Peony may be hidden at the apartment of their real math teacher and indeed they find a little girl chained there--one who turns out to be a counterfeit Peony Hyde, whose real name is, interestingly, Tasha Cormorant.

Now, as Sherlock would say, "The case is afoot!" Marzana's crew, self-named the Thief Knot, discover an undercover conductor on the mostly abandoned Nagspeake subway system, the Belowground, who takes the young sleuths to a nightmarish abandoned station, overgrown with the ornamental ironwork which infests the Liberty, overgrowing buildings, walkways, and especially subway tunnels, where the real kidnap victim is perhaps to be found.

With a plot with as many convolutions as the enchanted ironwork of The Liberty, Kate Milford's forthcoming third book in series, The Thief Knot: A Greenglass House Story (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020), nothing or no one is quite what it seems in a place where time and setting overlay each other. Like the Harry Potter series, the plot draws on the strengths of the young friends to solve a puzzle with many pieces, a band of unlikely mates--differently-abled in abilities, knowledge, and exceptional powers, but one in loyalty.

This is no quick-read Nancy Drew mystery, but one to be taken slowly, savored for its atmosphere, its murky clues, and shifting plot. In the Liberty, the haven for old secrets, Marzana not only helps solve the mystery of the missing student, but also some of the mysteries of her own parents' hidden histories. Milford's over-arching theme of connection, the links between people, places, and their joint history, provides a part-fantasy/mystery tale perfect for middle readers who like to solve puzzles that range from relationships to crimes of the past.

Previous books in this series are Greenglass House (read review here) and sequel Ghosts of Greenglass House (read review here).

Between the Dark and the Light: Ask the Dark by Henry Turner

I stopped.

A boy lay on the bank of the stream. He was naked, that boy, 'cept one shoe, with his body on the sand and rocks but his head partways in the water, his hair waving like weeds in the stream. I saw his face, all covered with cuts and blood.

I seen a piece of paper all red and bright, stuck to his dead ass. I bent over and snatched it up. I knew I couldn't just throw it over once I touched it, so I put it in my pocket.

Billy Zeets can't sleep. His dad's hurt, can't work, and their house is being foreclosed, and for some reason the dead, dark of night calls Billy, fitting his mood, and he wanders the streets and backyards and woods while the town sleeps. But when Billy finds the mutilated body of one of the boys in his town who have gone missing, Billy knows that someone else is using the night for darker purposes.

Billy is determined to find a way to make money to help his father, but he's just come out of a wild period, vandalizing and petty-thievery, and he's not high on anyone's hiring list. Occasionally working with Richie, a town n'eer-do-well who pays Billy to help load abandoned scrap metal into his pickup for sale, Billy is tempted to do a little shady junking himself, and on one nighttime expedition, he scales a tree up onto a roof and explores some promising storage boxes in the attic of Miss Gurpy, a once-well-to-do recluse, and finds one box filled with jewelry and vows to come back with a bag to carry it away.

Then Billy finds he's not the only one who knows what's in those boxes.

Coming into the room, I'd shut the door behind me. So what I done was step back maybe a yard, one big swooping step, to where I'd be behind the door if it opened. And all the while I was hearing somebody walking through the house. The footsteps stopped, and then they came on again, toward me. Whoever it was just come in the room and stood there.

Then I heard some shuffling and a light came on. Flashlight was that new kind that only shines where you point it. I don't think I breathed at all. I just stood there, three feet behind him.

All I could think was, If he turns, I'm caught.

'Course, I didn't know then who this fucker was, and that if he turned I was dead.

But working with Richie in a different house, Billy sees those same boxes, and something else. A sack of cement with a piece missing from the label, and Billy knows where that missing piece is--in his wallet where he'd saved it.

A little piece of torn red paper.

On my knees I went over to it, scuffing crost the floor, and where a piece was torn off the bag, I fit the piece.

It fit perfectly.

Now Billy thinks he knows who has been torturing and killing those boys in his town. And then he realizes that the murderer knows who he is and what he knows, too.

Henry Turner's Ask the Dark (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Clarion Books, 2015). is a slow-building cat-and-mouse thriller that is as dark as its setting, taking place mostly in the dark of night and among the dark secrets of his small town. Billy is an unlikely hero, a seeming loser, but dogged and ultimately possessed of great moral courage as he stalks his psychopathic stalker to a climax in a dank cellar that will leave young adult readers breathless. With rough talk for which he often begs "Skuze my language," a protagonist from Hardtimesville who proves that despite it all, Billy Zeets is a winner. Fans of teen suspense thrillers will take to this one, set on the dark side of a leafy little town where there be monsters as dreadful as any dragons.

Return of the Swamp Zombie: Skink--No Surrender by Carl Hiaasen

No more than three inches of the straw was exposed from the sand, but that was enough to pinch between my fingers. When I pulled it out of the mound, the in-and-out noise stopped.

But then, as I was peering at the spot where the soda straw had been in the sand, the turtle nest basically exploded. A full-grown man shot upright in a spray of sand. Built like a grizzly, he was coughing and swearing and spitting through a long, caked beard. On his head he wore (I swear) a flowered plastic shower cap. Even weirder, his left eye and right eye were pointed in different directions.

I vaulted back over the ribbon. After catching my breath, I asked, "What are you doing here?"

"Gagging, thanks to you."

"Dude, you can't sleep in a turtle nest!" I shouted.

In Carl Hiaasen's latest young adult novel, Skink--No Surrender (Alfred A. Knopf Books, 2014), fourteen-year-old Richard is introduced to one of Carl Hiaasen's iconic characters, swamp hermit Skink, former Vietnam vet and Florida governor, whose mission has become, to put it politely, avenging ecological transgressions. Sleeping concealed in a fake turtle nest to catch illegal egg pillagers, Skink's repose is interrupted by Richard on a round of nest inspections near his home.

Richard has been walking the beach, worrying about his cousin and best friend Malley, who apparently has disappeared impulsively on the way to boarding school in New Hampshire ("I don't do cold!") and whom Richard suspects has run away with an unsavory Instagram stalker who calls himself Talbo Chock, a name which a bit of googling turns out to be the stolen identity of a Marine killed in Afghanistan.

When Malley finally calls him, she tells Richard she's with a "friend," T.C., waiting for a drawbridge to open. Richard hears a ship's horn in the background and infers that she is somewhere along the Florida panhandle coast, and, telling his mother he's gone camping with a friend, heads off toward the nearest place with a drawbridge on a broad bay, the estuary of the Chocktawhatchee River. Along the way he meets up again with Skink, on the same mission. Combining forces, they determine that T.C. is holding Malley prisoner somewhere up the alligator and wild boar-infested river on a dilapidated rented houseboat, and the unlikely pair of rescuers set out behind them in a "borrowed" canoe.

Then when their beached canoe is washed down river in a flash flood, Skink dives in to catch it and is presumably pulled under by an eight-foot alligator. Horrified, Richard nevertheless resolves to continue on foot up river to free his cousin, where he discovers the houseboat anchored up a tributary creek with his cousin handcuffed to the wheel. Richard realizes that Malley's salvation is up to him alone.

But he reckons without the legendary recuperative powers of Hiaasen's iconic Skink, who survives having his foot run over by a truck while rescuing a baby turtle, a mauling by a giant 'gator, and being shot by T.C. along the way to a timely conclusion for their quest, and in a page-turning and well-deserved denouement, Richard and Malley reunite with him ("It's the Youth of America!" quips Skink) in time to see T. C. meet justice in the jaws of that same grandaddy 'gator. Although set in the familiar format of his young adult and adult eco-thrillers, Hiaasen makes use the motif of the iconic shaman and his fatherless apprentice in a modern morality play, complete with the sage mentor's totem, in this case the believed-extinct ivory-billed woodpecker which appears to Richard and Malley as the symbol of Hiaasen's perpetual theme, the hoped-for survival of Florida's native creatures and environment.

Hiaasen, who won Newbery honors for his first eco-thriller for young readers, Hoot, followed by its noted companion books, Flush, Scat, and Chomp (see my reviews here), sets all of his books in the abused but resilient Florida landscape, with humor and strong male and female characters on a cockeyed but riveting moral quest to right a wrong, personal and ecological. For reluctant readers (which many teens are), Hiaasen's newest work, a 2014 National Book Award nominee,  has it all--recognizable kid characters and the usual Florida suspects (here played by the revoltingly dead-gar-smelling brothers, "Nickel" and "Dime"), sharp wit, and a fast pace through one of the sort of all-out missions of justice that hold young readers fast.

Classic Hiaasen in all its glory! "It's a quintessentially Hiaasen romp for a younger set, combining a message of taking care of the world with suspense, humor, a generous helping of Florida wildlife and much heart," writes the New York Times reviewer.

Puppets and Phoenix Stones: Splendors and Glooms by Laura Amy Schlitz

"She is real," Parsefall said. "Grisini must've--"

Lizzie Rose's fingers tightened. "He couldn't have, Parse. People can't do things like that. Magic spells--and evil magicians--"

"It's 'er!" insisted Parsefall. "Grisini did her."

But I am Clara, Clara wanted to protest, and then the word puppet struck home.

"People can't change into puppets," argued Lizzie Rose.

"Look at the gewgaw she's wearin'!" said Parsefall.

"Her birthday locket!" gasped Lizzie Rose. "She showed it to me!"

Yes, thought Lizzie Rose. It was Grisini."

In a foggy, grimy Victorian London, two orphans are in thrall to an evil puppeteer. Little Parsefall is wizened, mysteriously missing one finger, but his tiny hands can manipulate Grisini's puppets with as much magic as his master's. Lizzie Rose has little facility with the puppets, but raised as a much-loved child before losing her parents, she plays the violin beautifully and speaks well. But both children fear Grisini, an aging, and dark and menacingly malevolent master who grudgingly feeds them little and allows them chilly shelter in his dank, decaying lodgings in Mrs. Pinchbeck's boarding house.

But when the pampered but loveless surviving child of the rich Wintermute family sees their show in the streets, she threatens a tantrum unless she can have the puppeteers at her twelfth birthday party. Somehow, Clara forms a bond of friendship with the two indentured orphans at the party, and when Lizzie and Parse learn that Clara has been kidnapped, they are immediately convinced that Grisini, who has fallen under suspicion before, is behind the deed.

And then, hidden in Grisini's musty trunk they find a new puppet, one that is a a perfect replica of Clara in to her birthday dress and her locket, which opens to a miniature of her dead twin, even down to the tiny lock of his hair inside. Suddenly they believe they understand the magnitude of Grisini's evil power and fearfully realize that only
can do something to save Clara.

But there is more to Grisini's malevolent plan than they realize. Grisini is immersed in a struggle with an evil magic more powerful than his own--the witch Cassandra, whose phoenix stone necklace gives her power even over him. What Grisini does not know is that the fire within that stone is destroying Cassandra from the inside out. Longing to rid herself of the very source of her power, she knows that the stone cannot be given away nor discarded, only stolen, and in a tangled scheme she draws Lizzie Rose and Parsefall to her dark, towered mansion in the hope that one of them will filch the necklace from her.

The two orphans escape from London with Clara's puppet, but Grisini tracks them down and follows after them, hoping to regain Clara and revivify her for her ransom and also to steal the phoenix stone for himself.

Like a master puppeteer herself, two-time Newbery author Laura Amy Schlitz skillfully manipulates her characters into a dramatic denouement that will leave readers stunned and yet satisfied, in her Splendors and Glooms (Candlewick, 2012). Reviewers have been universally unable to describe this gripping tale without calling it Gothic and Dickensian, and for good reason. Schlitz's setting, with the cold itself palpable, is seen only in a dim and gloomy light, grimy and filthy with manure in the streets and smelly and steaming with life, while her characters exhibit all of the dark places in the human heart as well as the surprising virtues of love, loyalty, courage, and redemption. Every character has his or her flaw, but except for Grisini, who remains true to type, his greedy and fateful flaw bringing about his own destruction, all, even Cassandra, are at last redeemed by their own transcending human grace. Said the New York Times Book Review," "Filled with heart-pounding and heart-rending moments, this delicious, glorious novel is the work of a master of children's literature."

Recipient of the 2013 Newbery Honor Award for this novel, Laura Amy Schlitz was awarded the Newbery Medal in 2008 for her Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices from a Medieval Village.

Reconciled: The Case of the Gypsy Good-bye (An Enola Holmes Mystery) by Nancy Springer

Stuffing the skytale into my bosom, "I shall send word!" I called over my shoulder as I darted out of the house and ran for all I was worth, hearing Sherlock's footfalls coming in behind me--but in the instant I reached the street, I whistled shrilly in a most unfeminine manner and a passing cab pulled up short. I leapt in and signalled the cabbie to drive on. I sat in full view of my brother as I drove away. I looked over my shoulder to see him about twenty feet behind me, breathing hard and looking fulminous.

He would be after me directly. I needed a hiding place--but also I urgently needed to reach the East End. Desperately I needed to disguise myself as I had never disguised myself before.

What's better for summertime reading that a good mystery, and Nancy Springer's latest installment in the Enola Holmes Mysteries, The Case of the Gypsy Goodbye: An Enola Holmes Mystery (Philomel, 2010) is a rip-roaring doozy of a detective tale. Enola Holmes, the runaway fourteen-year-old sister of Sherlock and Mycroft, finds herself dodging both seamy London criminals, the abductors of a beauteous and fragile noblewoman, and her two older brothers, still bent on nabbing Enola and stashing her away in a proper finishing boarding school for "young ladies." Enola, however, has other plans for her life, and since her mother Eudora abandoned her on her fourteenth birthday, she has lived by her wits in London and built a prosperous reputation herself as an investigator, disguised as the "personal assistant" of her fictional cover employer, Dr. Ragostin, Scientific Perditorian.

But when she takes on the case of the missing Blanchefleur, Duquessa Del Campo, apparently kidnapped as she assisted a beggarly old woman down into the London Underground, Enola finds herself in competition with the famous Sherlock himself, also summoned on the case. Disguised in fine clothes, expensive wig, and a fetching bonnet to begin her interrogation of the Duquessa's ladies-in-waiting, Enola barely avoids a face-to-face encounter with her brilliant brother only through her own quick wits. But when her true identity is revealed by the Holmes family's loyal collie, Reginald, for whom wigs and frippery are no impediment to recognition, Enola has to resort to a quick departure to escape what she considers capture and corseted captivity in that young ladies' academy by the well-meaning Sherlock and Mycroft.

Parallel and interwoven with the investigation of the Duquessa's disappearance, however, is another mystery--one closely involved with the strong theme of female self-realization which runs through the Enola series. Sherlock has another reason for finding Enola, to deliver an envelope addressed to her, inscribed with strange markings and Gypsy hex symbols,. This missive indeed turns out to be a cryptic and poignant message from Enola's mother, revealing to the reader that despite, and perhaps because of her mother's seemingly indifferent parenting, Enola is very much her mother's daughter, able to operate as an independent woman in what is the still repressive society for her gender.

Indeed, as she cooperates with Sherlock in the solving of the De Campo mystery and they share the decoding of the letter from their mother, there is a meeting of minds and a reconciliation between the long-separated Holmes siblings, one that gives some reviewers hope that this series, with its engaging setting in Victorian London's gas-lit cobbled streets, dark sewers, elegant drawing rooms, squalid back-streets, and its brilliant, self-reliant young heroine, will continue with more Sherlockian adventures.

As School Library Journal's reviewer says, "In this brilliantly written emotional tale, children will appreciate Enola's self-discovery on the importance of family and her determination to find her true fate."

And American Library Association's Booklist strongly concurs: "The series that features Enola Holmes, the (much) younger sister of Sherlock, continues to be flat-out among the best mysteries being written for young people today." (Starred Review)

Kidnapped! Taken by Edward Bloor

It's 2035, and in South Florida, where the uber-wealthy are concentrated in vast gated communities, kidnapping is second only to real estate as a growth industry.

Charity Meyers, only child of Dr. Jerome Meyers, famed dermatologist-inventor of Derma-Bronze, which has made deep tans safe and universal, is an eighth-grader, escorted by their armed faux-English butler Albert to and from her exclusive satschool where she attends with a handful of equally privileged students. Despite her wealth and privilege, life for Charity is limited to her close relationship with her maid Victoria, really her surrogate mother, who lets her help in the kitchen when her father and ex-stepmother are away, and her school friend Patience, with whom she shares dissatisfaction with her circumscribed life. For her schoolmates, shopping is limited to "satstores," and field trips are taken only under armed guard in an armored bus. Their parents' fears and overprotection are only reinforced when one of her classmates has an ear amputated when he is "taken."

So when Charity struggles back to consciousness and finds herself groggy and strapped to a gurney inside a disguised ambulance van, she knows that she, too, has somehow been abducted. As she tries to remain calm and wait for her ransom, Charity attempts to talk with her guard, a strangely well-educated young Haitian immigrant who calls himself Dessi. Although Dessi cynically describes kidnapping as a routine method of income redistribution in their post-credit crash world, the two young people learn that they share a bond in their grief for the early loss of their mothers. As Charity waits out the negotiations for her release, she gradually discovers that her protector Albert is himself one of the abductors.

Charity learns from Dessi that her father is scheduled to deliver her ransom by a midnight drop from his private helicopter, but to her horror as she watches on her vidscreen, the helicopter crashes and burns with her father aboard. Plan B for her kidnappers requires her ex-stepmother Mickie to deliver currency to the abductors, but in a foreshadowed but surprising plot twist which will blindside most readers, Charity discovers that almost no one is her life is what she believes him or her to be.

Edward Bloor's Taken is a tightly written thriller which will keep young adult readers racing through the book. His carefully developed characters and setting provide them with a less-than optimistic look at the near future in a society in which rich and poor live vastly different lives and in which the fight to get and hold onto currency has become the central fact of life. A worthy sequel to Bloor's acclaimed middle school novel Tangerine, this novel shares with Bloor's first novel a compelling combination of keen social awareness and skillfully suspenseful writing.