Eco-Spy in the Sky! Squirm by Carl Hiaasen

This one kid, he got kicked out of school. The kid's name was Jammer, and I got his locker.

Who knows what he kept in there, but he must've given out his combination to half the school. Kids were always messing with my stuff. So I put a snake inside the locker. Problem solved.

It was an Eastern diamondback, a serious reptile. The freak-out factor was high.

Don't worry. I taped its mouth shut. That's a tricky move, not for rookies. I wouldn't try it again. I just wanted kids to stay out of my locker.

Which they now do.

It's no surprise Billy is called Snake Boy wherever he lives. Billy Dickens' family moves around central Florida a lot because his mom is a serious bald eagle freak, so whenever her eagles move their nest, the Dickenses move, too. Billy likes eagles, but snakes are his passion. Once when he saw a guy swerve his motorcycle to run over a snake, Billy tracked him down and made sure his bike wound up at the bottom of a canal. Whatever school he goes to, he seems to keep the nickname "Snake Boy."

So it's no surprise that when Billy he discovers that his father is living with his new family in Montana, doing something mysterious in nature preserves "for the government," he buys his own airplane ticket and heads for Montana solo to ask his dad some important questions.

Billy hasn't seen his father since he was four, and barely remembers him, but somehow he's not surprised when he learns that his father is actually stalking an ultra-rich, self-proclaimed great white hunter, Lincoln Baxter, who preys on the most endangered animals, in this case a male grizzly. The griz gets away, but Billy only gets a cryptic note, dropped from his dad's drone, saying "Sorry for the lost years."

And with the help of his new-found step-sister, Summer, the next time Billy follows his father's drone into the mountains, he also finds his dad, wounded and staked out with a dead deer as grizzly bait for trophy hunter Baxter. And when the showdown with Baxter comes, Baxter seems to hold all the cards.

"So, your plan was to let the grizzly kill my dad," I say, "and then you'd shoot the bear and tell the game wardens... "

"Justified," says Baxter. "It's completely legal to take a grizzly in self-defense."

Suddenly the birds stopped singing. Something heavy is advancing through the woods. It's not trying to be sneaky. Baxter raises his rifle to his shoulder, while I reach for the pocket where I put the can of bear spray. At the same moment Baxter takes aim at the fierce commotion, I take aim, too...

Blasting the poacher point blank in the face.

"Good shot, Billy," Dad says, as he lurches out of a thicket, trailing cut ropes "How'd you know it was me?"

"Wild guess."

It's another wild ride through the wilds in Carl Hiaasen's latest eco-thriller, Squirm (Alfred A. Knopf, 2018), with the author's off-beat Florida ecological heroes meeting the big-time rare animal poaching industry in a timely novel--with the engaging and resourceful Billy Dickens and his weird but dedicated dad trying to preserve grizzlies and Florida panthers and along the way find a new relationship based on their mutual love of wild animals. Not many writers for middle readers offer outdoor survival skills, family loyalties, and a place for characters with unusual qualities, but in his books for young people Hiaasen manages to remain the master of the maverick hero whose ecological mission finds danger and adventure in the wild. Says Bulletin, "Hiaasen's ecological passion shows no sign of abatement, and neither does his faith in kid resourcefulness and family resilience."

Carl Hiaasen's earlier humorous and exciting eco-novels also star young protagonists (mostly boys and indispensable sisters or step-sisters) who manage to foil ecological villains in his top-selling, Newbery-winning Hoot and Flush, (see reviews here), Chomp (review here), Scat (review here), and Skink--No Surrender (Skink Series) (review here).

Aforethought? With Malice by Eileen Cook

Beep, Beep. Beep. Beep.

My hand couldn't muster the energy to turn off the alarm. The blanket felt wrong.

This isn't my bed.

I hoped I'd remembered to call my mom. I was going to be in deep shit for not coming home.

I forced my eyes open. I turned my head to see the alarm but as soon as I moved, there was a shot of pain like a dental drill. My vision blurred. It wasn't a clock. It was some kind of machine. Plastic tubing connected it to me.

I was in a hospital.

Jill Charron's last memory is of a party celebrating the successful run of the senior production of Grease, with her best friend Simone in the starring role of Sandy. But then she learns that that memory is six weeks old, that she remembers nothing since that night--not her long-awaited Adventure Abroad in Italy, and certainly not the car crash that killed Simone, not the chartered flight back to the U.S. her wealthy father arranged or the weeks in and out of consciousness since, nor any explanation for Simone's death. At the rehabilitation hospital, her psychiatrist tells her she has retrograde amnesia, a deep inability to remember anything in the six weeks since the cast party.

As the next weeks go by, what she is told about the time in Italy is even more disturbing. Jill reads that students on the tour reported that she had slapped Simone during a quarrel over a boy, Nicolo, one of the Italian guides, with whom she had become close during the first week abroad, and that the next day Jill, with Simone in the passenger seat, had driven a rented car off a road and into a ravine in a town she's never heard of. Two Italian police claim evidence that the accident was no accident, but the result of malice aforethought on Jill's part, cause for her extradition to Italy for trial for murder.

Jill begins to read news reports, which recount the jealous quarrel with Simone and report a bloody knife with her fingerprints in the wrecked car. A blog called "Justice for Simone" reveals some of her classmates picturing the reserved, studious Jill as a vindictive frenemy, jealous of the outgoing, popular Simone. Jill begins to have fragmentary memories from the time in Italy, including one horrifying moment in a car with Simone screaming in terror beside her. And when Jill learns that Simone was the abusive troll who caused her to shut down her blog, she realizes that the girl she thought was her best friend clearly was something else.

Had Simone intentionally tried to take Jill's first boyfriend away just to prove she could? Had Simone smugly told her the truth when confronted? And had Jill reacted with enough malice aforethought to risk ending her own life to take Simone's?

Eileen Cook's With Malice (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016) is suspenseful page-turner that doles out evidence but leave leave many questions, a teaser of a mystery with no classic solution, a finish that will doubtless leave young adult readers with different conclusions as to where, if with anyone, the true guilt lies. But, oh, what a trip this novel is, with its slow but relentless revelation of the hidden intricacies of the human heart.

Only Connect: Greenglass House by Kate Milford

Milo grabbed his boots and ducked outside before anyone could ask him where he was going, passing his father busy stacking firewood, and sprinted down the path and into the woods.

He found the paperback right away, wedged between the Whilforber Whirlwind and the edge of the wooden floor. He must have dropped it when the tower of luggage had come tumbling down. He was just about to head back inside when he spotted something else on the steel tracks.

It looked like a blue leather wallet, only bigger. Milo climbed down onto the rails behind the car and picked it up.

And that's how he found the first map.

The paper was old and green-tinged. It was brittle and delicate. Milo held it up so that the light from the closest lamppost shone through, and he could just make out a watermark: it looked like a wrought-iron gate, but warped and wrenched out of its original shape.

It was then that Milo realized what he was looking at.

It is the beginning of Christmas break, and Milo Pine is looking forward to spending the snowy holidays quietly with his family in their inn. Known locally as the "smuggler's inn," the Pines' Greenglass House rarely had holiday guests, smugglers or otherwise, but just as Milo settles in to enjoy his vacation, the visitors' bell rings and two unusual guests arrive in the lift from the village below. The two elderly passengers. Mrs. Hereward and Mr. Vinge, commence shouting violently at each other over their mixed-up luggage. Hardly had Mrs. Pine soothed their ruffled feathers with cups of tea than more unexpected guests arrive, two young women, the blue-haired Georgie, who informs Milo, carrying her bags upstairs, that she is a thief, and the red-haired Clem, who flies effortlessly and  soundlessly up the always creaky old stairs and describes herself as a cat burglar. Then in short order, Mrs. Carraway, a village woman hired to help with the kitchen work, arrives with a young girl, who calls herself Meddy, and yet another guest, the fusty Dr. Gowerwine.

Milo falls asleep by the fire reading The Raconteur's Commonplace Book, loaned to him by Georgie, and wakens to find Meddy looking at him curiously and holding the blue wallet.

"So you're adopted, then?" she asked. "I heard you were."

Milo is annoyed. So, he's obviously Chinese and his parents are just ordinary locals. Nice of her to point it out. But then, as she opens the wallet and studies the fragile old map inside, she comes up with an intriguing idea.... a campaign, a role-playing game of Odd Trails, to discover the meaning of the map and the true mission of the person who lost it in the snow.

"We're stuck here, right? Might as well do something fun." she said.

Reluctantly, Milo agrees. But as Meddy explains that the two of them must take on a new personas, avatars, he as Negret, the escaladeur, and Meddy as Sirin, the scholiast, Milo finds himself intrigued with his new persona as lock picker, athletic burglar. and adventurer, and agrees to play the game.

And as events unfold, it seems that their guests are not what they seem either. Milo's map is stolen first from its hiding place beneath the carpet, and then each of the guests have something taken from their rooms, each object with a connection to the old inn. And as Milo and Meddy work together to discover everyone's purpose, they discover that each one of them as well is connected in the most odd ways with Greenglass House, and not just the oceanside inn it now is. Milo learns that the inn was the one-time mansion of the notorious smuggler, Doc Holystone, whose map leads to a sort of treasure after all, not a runner's hoard, but a bequest for his daughter, who herself died in a fall the night a customs officer chased Doc Holystone over the cliff.

Unleashing the tangle of connections between everyone there and their relation to the cypher hidden in the stained glass windows of the old house leads Milo to an insight into his own heritage and of Meddy's true identity, one that will reward readers with a last surprising revelation in the story's dramatic and satisfying conclusion.

Forthcoming today, Kate Milford's Greenglass House (Houghton Mifflin Clarion, 2014), set within the Gothic background of an old inn with its own secrets and a strange assortment of snowbound guests, all seeking some revelation hidden in the history of the old house, is a layered, slow-developing story that unwinds the connections between each character in fascinating fashion, saving the inn's deepest secret for last.

An atmospheric mystery and tale of the past in which the old mansion itself is almost a character, part role-playing game and part family story, with overlays of smuggling lore, Milford's engrossing story will appeal to fans of supernatural history mysteries such as Mary Downing Hahn's All the Lovely Bad Ones, and The Old Willis Place, Trenton Lee Stewart's The Mysterious Benedict Society and sequels,  the several books in series, written by a stable of famous authors, The 39 Clues, Pseudonymous Bosch's Secret series or Lissa Evans' Horten's Miraculous Mechanisms: Magic, Mystery,  and a Very Strange Adventure.

Recalculating Directions. Turn Left At the Cow by Lisa Bullard

The deputy looked back at me. "I can't give you the answers to those questions, kid. I did think of your dad as my friend. But turns out I didn't really know him the way I thought I did."

Deputy Dude continued. "As far as the money goes, here's the thing.  In law enforcement you learn that lots of times the obvious answer is the right answer.  I'm not real big on coincidences.  I mean, I'd like to give you the benefit of the doubt, but the truth is... you and the cash turn up the exact same week. It's almost guaranteed the money's reappearance is connected to you.  

So if there's anything  you want to tell me, I promise to help you out.  I can pull a few strings for the sake of your grandma; you won't be in trouble."

When his mother remarries, Travis is pretty sure he's the third wheel in the way of the newly-wed's summer travel plans, so he "borrows" his mom's credit card number to buy a one-way ticket to the tiny town in Minnesota where his ne'er-do-well dead dad's mother lives, a place so small he jokes that the final GPS direction to find it would have to be "Turn left at the cow." Trav has hopes that his Grandma may know why his father robbed the local bank and disappeared along with the loot, leaving only a drifting boat near an island in the local lake and questions about his presumed drowning.

But at first Grandma is grim and tight-lipped. The only things from the past she reveals to Trav are the seemingly ancient wrapped remains of his dad's hunting and fishing prowess in the hiccuping old freezer that he is assigned to clean out as the first part in his penance for running away. Travis and Grandma load the "dead animal parts," frozen in plastic Halloween bags labelled "Deer" and "Walleye," to haul them off to the dump, where Trav has his first encounter with "Crazy Carl," a man who once mentored his dad but now is reduced to muttering and living amid the trash. Crazy Carl, however, is sharp enough to recognize Trav as his father's son and in the midst of his mutterings, suddenly says cryptically, "I know where it is."

As Travis soon learns, "it," is the missing loot from the bank robbery, now a local legend, centering mostly around the small island in the lake which folks from town have spent much spare time digging up over the past thirteen years. With the help of a couple of new friends, the football-loving Kenny and his good-looking cousin Isabelle, a.k.a Iz, Travis is filled in on the missing chapter in his family history according to village lore and begins his own search of the reputed "treasure" island where his dad is believed to have buried the money on the night of his disappearance. Travis feels he is beginning to understand why his mother refused to tell him anything about his father, and despite her initial tight-lipped distance, he and his grandmother begin to feel a new rapport.

But then, after Grandma gives Trav money to buy a new bike at the local store, "bait" notes from the robbery turn up in the day's till. Travis is immediately the prime suspect. Then he receives an anonymous warning, spelled out with letters cut from a newspaper:

I KNOW YOU HAVE THE $$$.
BURY IT ON THE ISLAND WITHIN 24 HOURS.
LOCATION MARKED ON MAP.
DO IT OR YOU'LL BE SORRY!

And in true mystery style, it is only during that midnight bike ride to the dump to meet the suspect that Travis suddenly realizes exactly where the stolen money must be.  (Hint: Foreshadowing here!)

Lisa Bullard's just-released Turn Left at the Cow (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013) catches just the right combination of  a buried treasure mystery, a brush with a mendacious murderer, a recalculation of family dynamics, and a bit of  sweet summer romance in this cool-kid-from-L.A.-meets-mystery-in-dairyland page turner. A farmland detective story in which even the setting plays a part, this debut novel is well-plotted and measured in development. and despite its undeniably entertaining style, proves to be somewhat of a coming-of-age novel as well. Teen sleuthing, a dash of life-and-death danger, and a hint of first love by the lake will make this one appealing to middle readers, both male and female.

Playwrights, Spies, and Cryptic Engravings: Tower of the Five Orders by Deron R. Hicks

Julian slid the drawing across the table to Colophon. "It's a perfect copy of the crest on the inkwell."

She placed the drawing in the middle of the table. The image appeared to be a crest or coat of arms. It was in the shape of a shield: a bird and flowers.

"This could take a few weeks," Julian warned. "We need to get a copy of Pimbley's Dictionary of Heraldry, and there are several registries for ancient coats of arms. We may have to look at hundreds--maybe thousands...."

"Or," said Colophon, "we can Google it."

The search came back with about 3,940,000 results.

"Well, that should narrow it down a bit," said Julian.

A knock on the library door interrupted their discussion. Meg Letterford walked in carrying a tray of sandwiches.

"Thanks, Mom," said Colophon.

Meg placed the tray on the table beside the drawing. "Dare I ask what you're doing?"

Julian and Colophon looked at each other. "Well," said Colophon, "it's complicated."

"As long as it doesn't lead to another dangerous underground crypt, then I'm okay with it." Mom shot a look at Julian.  "Oh, one last thing," she said. Meg pointed at Julian's drawing. "I've spent time at Cambridge University and I'm certain that's the crest of Corpus Christi College."

In Deron Hicks' first book, Secrets of Shakespeare's Grave: The Shakespeare Mysteries, Book 1 (Letterford Mysteries,) twelve-year-old Colophon and her older cousin Julian had sleuthed out the cryptic clues to uncover a portfolio of unknown Shakespearean writings, thereby saving Letterford and Sons Publishing from a hostile takeover by the mendacious and unethical cousin Treemont Letterford. Colophon's father Mull Letterford had believed that his family's 400-year-old publishing house was safe in his hands for his generation. Stymied for the moment, however, Treemont Letterford wastes no time sinking the family fortunes and business by blackmailing "Shakespearean "experts" to declare the writings a certain forgery, sinking the venerable company's profits and allowing him to take over the business and the Manchester, Georgia, mansion of the American Letterford clan.

Defeated, the bookishly-named siblings, Colophon and her brother Case, prepare to leave the Letterford estate and move with their parents to London, into the old Letterford house. But Colophon remembers Julian's prediction that their findings, Shakespeare's lost portfolio and an old glass inkwell, might well be clues themselves to the storied treasure of their ancestor Miles Letterford. Examining the old inkwell which had sat for some time on her bookshelf, Colophon discerns through the tarnished top an inkling of markings that indeed seem to be leading them to additional clues at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge.

With the Bohemian Julian as her adult escort, Colophon follows the secret ciphers through the old buildings of Cambridge with many a close call until they manage to snitch Christopher Marlowe's Matriculation Quill from under the nose of its curmudgeonly Keeper. Decoding its engraved symbols leads the intrepid Colophon and Julian back into "another dangerous underground crypt" just as her mother had feared, this time following the long-bricked-over Fleet River through London's ancient sewers toward a secret room with Letterford's storied treasure inside.

Occasionally Colophon would catch a glimpse of sunlight filtering down through a drain. But for the most part, their journey was dark and cold. An entire city lay just above her head, she knew, yet she had never felt more isolated from the rest of the world. The air felt stale and undisturbed. And she could hear things. Things that scraped, skittered, and scratched just outside the beam of her flashlight.

But as the two cousins discover when they approach the hidden door, they are not the only Letterfords who have cracked the family code.

Deron Hicks' delightfully arcane mystery, Tower of the Five Orders: The Shakespeare Mysteries, Book 2 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013) finds the courageous Colophon, her scholarly cousin Julian, and her technologically savvy brother Case again matching wits with the greedy and wicked Treemont to retain the ownership of Letterford and Sons. In settings which vary from wooded estate in Georgia to modern London and the hidden Elizabethan world in which the founder Miles Letterford and his friends Marlow and Shakespeare lived, this second of the Letterford Mysteries succeeds in continuing the deliciously shadowy and cryptic adventures of Colophon, a girl sleuth with one foot in the modern world and one foot in the sixteenth-century as she follows the dormant clues left for her by her esteemed ancestor. For readers who love arcane ciphers, centuries-old libraries, and dimly-lit stone caverns in a literary storyline, pair this one with its predecessor (see my 2012 review here) for some fine reading for a dark autumnal night.

True to its literary ambiance, Deron Hicks' appendix provides the neologisms, Shakespeare's own invented words, which head up each chapter, with a thumbnail quote from their sources in the plays, from As You Like It through The Tempest, and includes its own antique colophon, or publisher's mark and identification.

Jack On The Road: From Norvelt to Nowhere by Jack Gantos

"You don't want to flatten me," Bunny Hoffer warned, "'cause I have some incredible news."

"Another Russian sneak attack?" I asked.

"Better than that," she cried out.

"Well, don't just stand there like a lawn gnome," Miss Volker snapped, referring to Bunny's stumpy size. "Spit it out!"

"Well," she boldly announced with a flourish. "Private sources tell me that a very old lady named Mrs. Custer at house E-19 has returned to town. And you know what that means."

"Do tell me," Miss Volker replied with disdain.

"It means," Bunny explained slowly, calculating the impact of her point, "that you are no longer the last standing original old Norvelter in Norvelt."

It's Halloween afternoon, the Cuban missile crisis is in full swing, and the little town of Norvelt has barely recovered from the murder of all but one of its  ancient founding ladies. Only Miss Volker remains, given a lifetime charge by the town's founder Eleanor Roosevelt to be local coroner and obituary writer.   Although  she and Jack, a.k.a. The Grim Reaper, complete with scythe and the latest detective skills, haf traced the old-lady murders to Mr. Spizz, who vanished before justice could be served, it seems Mrs. Volker is not out of a job after all. When a long-forgotten Norvelt expatriate, Mrs. Custer, returns to her old house, she, too, is dispatched by a Halloween cookie laced with the same poison that killed the others.

Jack, costumed for Halloween as Mr. Spizz and sporting a  schnozz just like Spizz's (sculpted from cadaver-wax by Bunny, the undertaker's daughter), witnesses Mrs. Custer nibbling the tainted Girl Scout cookie and falls under suspicion from the local police,  but  Jack and Miss. Volker are sure that the murderer is Spizz, with a peculiarly romantic motive.  More than a half-century ago, Miss Volker swore to  Spizz that she would only marry him when she was the last founding lady alive,  and now, with the sudden death of the newly-returned Mrs. Custer, she is convinced that Spizz has again resorted to murder to force her into keeping her promise of matrimony.

But with a new mystery to resolve, Volker's spunk returns after its brief funk. With the zeal of her idol, Eleanor Roosevelt, in her eyes, she proclaims that she and Jack have a special mission:

"A great moment of clarity has saved me.  I'm going to track down that thick-skulled white whale and then I'm going to kill him.  I'll be his Captain Ahab."

"But didn't Moby Dick kill Ahab?" I suggested delicately because she was so worked up.

"Not in my version," she squalled. "In my version I'm Mrs. Captain Ahab and I jam my ivory peg leg right down Moby Dick's blowhole.  Sometimes it takes a woman to get the job done properly." She gave me a severe look that squelched what I was about to say.

"Don't you dare feel bad for wanting to knock off Spizz," she commanded.  "He deserves Old Testament justice--an eye for and eye and a tooth for a tooth."

So Miss Volker sets out on quest that out road-trips anything  Hollywood has to offer, with twelve-year-old Jack at the wheel of a battered VW Beetle with "Runs Great" painted on the windshield and Miss Volker armed with a pistol and a harpoon with a length of rope attached, in a chase story with as many plot twists as the rocky road to Rugby, Tennessee.  The seemingly deranged Volker tracks the elusive Spizz from Eleanor Roosevelt's fresh grave at Hyde Park to Miss Volker's childhood home in the Utopian English village of Rugby, Tennessee, to the swamps of south Florida. But there is a steely and sane method behind Volker's madness, and at the end of their mission, the dearly departed rise from their caskets, the real murderer and his plot to destroy Norvelt are outed, and true love conquers all, in Jack Gantos' long-awaited,  wildly wacky, comic, and dead serious sequel to his Newbery Award-winning  Dead End in Norvelt (see review here).

In that review I said, "Gantos' novels are like no other, filled with drop-dead wacky fun, seemingly chaotic, but somehow pulling themselves together brilliantly, like kaleidoscope glass which suddenly falls into a meaningful and beautiful pattern as it turns. Serious and hilarious, fast-paced yet reflective, untidy but emerging as solid coming-of-age story, this novel easily takes its place within Gantos' formidable body of work." Those words equally describe the just-published From Norvelt to Nowhere (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2013), a not-to-be-missed novel for Gantos fans and all middle readers who like an out-of-the-box read that revels in and reveals the Jekyll-and-Hyde dichotomy of the human personality.

"Gantos’s sequel to his Newbery-winning Dead End in Norvelt offers less history, more murder, and another hefty helping of zaniness," says Publishers Weekly succinctly.

Meet the PuzzleMeister: The Puzzler's Mansion by Eric Berlin



Winston Breen had never been in trouble before–-not this much trouble.

His lab partner was a girl named Pamela Cassetti. She was absent the day Winston landed in the principal’s office, and that was probably half the problem right there. If Pamela had been around, Winston might have paid more attention to today’s experiment.

But no. Winston’s eyes settled on some glass beakers, drying by the sink. They reminded him of a puzzle he had seen, and he wondered if he could recreate it. There was plenty of time left to get his experiment done, so he took the three beakers to his table and examined them.

It’s an intriguing puzzle, involving one water-filled 8-ounce beaker, one empty 5-ounce and one empty 3-ounce beaker from which the solver has to produce one with exactly 4 ounces in one without discarding any liquid. Winston is soon totally zoned out, and Mrs. Haider notices he’s totally off-task. And when she calls him down on it, Winston is so befuddled that he manages to break all three beakers in his haste to put them away. Mrs. Haider goes ballistic.

Winston’s parents lower the boom on him. This is not the first problem Winston has been having during the first weeks of seventh grade, all because of his tendency to lose himself in  puzzles when classes gets boring. Faced with a grounding and moratorium on puzzles, even Winston wonders if his penchant for puzzles is turning into a mal-adaptive compulsion.

Will Winston be compelled to give up puzzling?

But just as Winston finishes his puzzle-free punishment, he gets an amazing opportunity: his mentor, curio-shop proprietor Mr. Penrose, invites him and his friends Mal and Jake to a puzzle weekend at the mansion of Richard Overton, virtuoso pianist and dedicated puzzlemaster.

The mansion is everything the boys imagine, and the guests and their ‘tweener children, mostly celebrities of music and show business, turn out to be skillful puzzle-solvers, too. Winston is in near nirvana.

But there is trouble in puzzle paradise. Overton’s valuable puzzle prizes are stolen, one at a time, the first one from a locked room, and Winston and his buddies are soon deep into a puzzling crime mystery. The other young guests, the sulky Zook, a shoplifter by his dad’s own admission, is the first suspect, but then the supercilious Amanda is caught snooping around in the many nooks and crannies of the huge house, and it seems that almost everyone is both a suspect and a sleuth.

Between solving Richard’s puzzles, the kids find themselves turning into a team of detectives in a case which eventually leads them into secret passageways beneath the mansion and its grounds and a completely unlikely suspect, in Eric Berlin’s third puzzler novel, The Puzzler's Mansion: The Puzzling World of Winston Breen (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2012). As always, Berlin builds in lots of brainteasing puzzles along with a a mystery plot which accelerates, slowly at first, to culminate in a (literally) smashing climax. Along the way Winston learns more than new puzzling skills as he sees how Overton, a world-famous concert pianist, and his other accomplished guests have managed to integrate their careers and puzzle mania into successful lives. As Overton tells him,

“Whatever your passion is–even if you’re great at it–it can’t be the only thing you do. If you do, you’ll be great at that one thing...and bad at everything else.”

Eric Berlin not only fills his narrative with engaging puzzles to please his readers, but includes an extensive appendix of  even more brain twisters (with answers) . The puzzles from the story can also be downloaded and printed at www.winstonbreen.com.

The previous puzzle-themed books in this series include The Puzzling World of Winston Breen and The Potato Chip Puzzles: The Puzzling World of Winston Breen.

Top Dog? The Legend of Diamond Lil by Doreen Tully

I was missing scents, leaving the chickens vulnerable, and as tired as I had ever been.

Keeping the chickens safe was a job I wasn't going to be able to do on my own.

I needed a partner.

Someone quick. Someone smart. Someone I could trust.

Someone like Lil.

Retired search-and-rescue dog J. J. Tully has a new case, a wily 'possum who keeps penetrating his well-guarded perimeter and making her way to the chicken coop where Moosh and her chickens are roosting every night. Despite his best detecting skills, he finds he is being outsmarted by that mangy marsupial, and his self-esteem is taking a nose dive.

It doesn't help that all the chicks have gone ga-ga over the their neighbor Barb's new dog, Lillian, a glossy white Samoyed who affects a Georgia drawl and a magnolia manner that impresses the entire barnyard. Even J.J. Tully, veteran nose-for-hire, finds himself falling under her Southern spell despite himself.

But despite her shiny, talcum-powder-white coat, J. J. begins to suspect that there is something shady about this shaggy lady. For one thing, she never seems to go inside Barb's house, even pretending to prefer sleeping under the house. And then she seems strangely clueless about Barb's daughter Bobby, away at college since summer, and J.J.'s gumshoe nose smells an impostor when Lil casually refers to Bobby (real name Roberta) as he. J.J. realizes that in order to solve the 'possum caper he's going to have to sniff out who Lil really is.

In her second sequel to the well-review first book, The Trouble with Chickens: A J.J. Tully Mystery (J. J. Tully Mysteries), Doreen Cronin's latest entry has all the giggle potential of its predecessor. J. J. Tully is a worth successor to the notable Hank the Cowdog, just as self-important and yet unsure of his place as the protector of poultry, and in her spoof of the hard-boiled detective genre, the colorful characters Cronin creates--wise-cracking Moosh the hen and her cheeky chicks, Dirt, Sugar, Poppy, and Sweetie, house dog and part-time villain Vince-the-Funnel, presumed perpetrator Ida Rose the 'Possum, and the suspected impostor Diamond Lil--are classy supporting players.  The Legend of Diamond Lil: A J.J. Tully Mystery (J. J. Tully Mysteries) (Balzer & Bray, 2012) is a perfect fit for the early-chapter-book reader who likes a potpourri of elements in their fiction.

As School Library Journal puts it, "“Children who like a little bit of everything mixed into their reading, particularly mystery, adventure, and animals, will enjoy this book.”

With Eyes Wide Open: The Cameo Necklace (A Cecile Mystery) by Evelyn Coleman

As quickly as the old woman had disappeared. Cecile found herself being moved along by a new crush of people emerging from the showboat.

At the same time, Cecile reached up to feel for her necklace. Her fingers grasped air.

Panic exploded in her chest. The necklace she had borrowed from her aunt was gone.

Cecile had marveled at the circus aboard the showboat, and she was secretly pleased that her rival Agnes Metoyer was obviously envious of Tante Tay’s cameo, the last gift from her young husband who had died in the yellow fever epidemic of 1853. Cecile’s aunt had promised to let her wear it for a really special event, and even hough her favorite aunt was away, Cece had felt sure that the circus would count as that special event when she took the necklace from her aunt’s bureau and placed it proudly around her own neck.

But a tall marchand selling sweet buns had stumbled into the crowd, and Cece had fallen, knocking down an old woman as well, who had pulled Cece to her feet with a sharp gaze.

And now the cameo necklace is gone. Tante Tay will be back in only ten days, and Cecile knows she must find that necklace. There were several people near  when it  disappeared–the orange bun seller, the old woman with the bracelets, a blonde lady circus performer, two elusive dark-eyed children selling cypress baskets, even Agnes and Fanny Montoyer, caught in the press of the crowd. Could one of them have found her necklace, or even stolen it in the melee?

Always sheltered by her well-to-do and protective free Black gens de couleur libres family, the need to recover her aunt’s beloved keepsake takes Cecile Rey out of her family and into the diverse community that is is New Orleans in 1854.  Well-brought-up girls of the Creole culture do not go out alone, so Cecile manages to go along to the marketplace with their cook Mathilde and their new maid Hannah where she looks for the two young basket sellers and the old lady.

Cece even turns to her older brother Armand, confiding her secret to him, to help her find the those around her at the time the necklace went missing. And with him at Congo Square, she finds the old woman, who beckons her near:

“Come, Cecile,” the old woman called. “ My name is Madame Irene. I knew you would be here today.”

“Those we cannot know have your necklace. Open your eyes so you can see. And you will learn much more than you seek, Cecile Rey.”

And in the next days, Cecile meets circus performers, takes a wild elephant ride at the dock, and sees her brother Armand almost taken away in chains by slave catchers. Following the old woman’s lead, Cecile meets the two mysterious children and learns they are maroons, fugitive slaves living in the swamps just outside the city, and that her new maid, Hannah is herself an escaped slave. And when the slave catchers come for her at midnight, it falls to Cecile and Armand to help Hannah flee to the shelter of the swamp and the maroon community. In the search for the cameo necklace, Cece’s eyes are indeed opened.

Until the last few days, Cecile had been blind to all the things that happened to people of color. She’d thought only of people like herself, the gens de couleur libres; she had rarely thought about slaves and certainly not maroons. She touched the paper in her pocket, the only thing that kept her free. It seemed very fragile now.

Cecile shivered. Her eyes were opening, but Armand was right–-she wasn’t sure she wanted to see.

As in all the popular American Girl series, Evelyn Coleman’s The Cameo Necklace: A Cecile Mystery (American Girl) (American Girl Mysteries) (American Girl, 2012) tells the story of an American girl in transition into an an awareness of the society around her in a significant period of American history. New Orleans in the early 1850s was a peculiarly diverse community, in which the cultured and well-to-do free people of color held a unique place of some power and influence. But as the country worked its tortuous way toward the upheaval of the Civil War, even Cecile and Armand, sheltered and well-educated, find themselves in peril of losing the small freedoms their family have cherished. A rare coming-of-age tale set in the colorful atmosphere of a mystery in old New Orleans, this book can be an eye-opener for its readers along with its heroine Cecile.

As in all books in the American Girl series, there is an color illustrated appendix, "Looking Back--A Peek into the Past" which puts the story into the context of pre-Civil War New Orleans, followed by a glossary and pronunciation guide to the French words and names used in the story.

Kayo! The Brixton Brothers: It Happened on a Train by Mac Barnett

"I'm a retired detective, okay?"

Dana rubbed his chin. "So what's the plan? I mean, there's nothing we can do, right?"

"Look," said Steve. "There's an innocent person who is almost definitely in some kind of danger right now. What I'm saying is that I've been trying to stay out of the game--"

"The game?"

"Yes, I've been turning down jobs left and right. But I can't let this happen. This girl needs a detective. I'm reopening the Brixton Brothers Detective Agency. Dana, we're back in business."

"WE?"

Steve Brixton thinks he has given up the gumshoe game and retired to taking out the trash, until he boards a train for a social studies convention with his friend (Don't call me chum!) Dana. A fan and imitator of the Bailey Brothers books, Steve is fond of dime-novel detective lingo and feels a case coming on as soon as he boards the train, despite its lack of Orient Express elegance. What about that sealed, windowless car at the end of the train? There's got to be a mystery there somewhere.

And when he meets an intriguing girl on the dining car of the train, his detective DNA begins to assert itself. Claire is not your standard pre-teen queen, but there's a certain attraction there, an air of mystery, and when Steve looks for her to return the book she left behind in the dining car, all his sleuthing skills come to the fore when she is nowhere to be found on the train. Steve is sure she has been kidnapped and can only be being held prisoner in that mysteriously sealed car at the end of the train.

With a very unenthusiastic Dana reluctantly playing gumshoe sidekick, the two seventh-grade sleuths are off and detecting as they find themselves in the middle of a stolen antique car case that soon finds Steve locked inside a broiling sauna, shut inside a car trunk, cuffed, locked, and left in a closet with Claire and Dana, and with his chums, escaping just in time from an exploding warehouse full of antique cars in Mexico.

It's all in a day's sleuthing for the reprised Brixton Brothers Agency as Steve bum-rushes, kayos, and wooden-horse-capers on his way to the closing of the case in Mac Barnett's latest installment, It Happened on a Train (Brixton Brothers) (Simon & Schuster, 2011), soon available in a brand-new paperback edition. A deliciously tongue-in-cheek parody of the venerable Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew teen-sleuth genre, this one offers page-turning adventures and literary satire along with its many laughs. Kirkus kayos their review, saying "Barnett’s sly and often silly Hardy Boy parody chugs along with plenty of laughs and enough honest-to-gosh mystery to please any lover of boy detective fiction. [Adam] Rex’s black-and-white pencil drawings (which also parody the Hardy tales) are still a fine match for the goofiness."

Earlier entries in this series include The Ghostwriter Secret (Brixton Brothers) and The Case of the Case of Mistaken Identity (Brixton Brothers), with a brand-new installment, Danger Goes Berserk (Brixton Brothers) published October 12.

From the Crypt! Secrets of Shakespeare's Grave by Deron K. Hicks

Julian made the final turn first and burst through the opening. As Colophon put her foot on the final step, she tripped and fell. The alarm on her watch started beeping.  The ticking had stopped.

As soon as Julian made it through the door and into the mausoleum, he heard the thud behind him and Colophon's cry. He turned back to the door.  It was slowly closing.

Colophon tried to get to her knees, but she felt as if she were moving in slow motion.  Suddenly the light was gone. Colophon was scrambling on her knees in the direction of the door.  Was it already closed?

Suddenly something grabbed her right hand.

Hiding quickly behind a large ornamental vase, twelve-year-old Colophon Letterford eavesdrops on conference of the assembled Letterford clan, only to learn that cousin Treemont Letterford plans a takeover of Letterford and Sons, the centuries-old prestigious publishing house. A series of unexplained and quite unfortunate events has threatened a financial collapse of the old firm, and under the rules established by founder Miles Letterford in 1616, the ownership of the firm and all properties are to devolve upon the next oldest male Letterford by midnight on Christmas eve if Letterford and Sons is not solvent on that date. Colophon's father, Mull Letterford has but a month, but he points out that he has meetings with three best-selling authors to publish their latest manuscripts, any one of which would restore the firm to profitability.
But the appearance of Colophon's oddball second cousin Julian at the family Thanksgiving suggests another way of saving her home and her father's firm. Julian is skinny, disheveled, and apparently obsessed with the elusive mystery of the family treasure secreted by Miles Letterford, and his impromptu visit to the family's estate in Georgia is focused on finding clues in the portrait of founder Miles in Mull's study.

Partially convincing the dubious Julian of her puzzle-solving abilities, Colophon insists upon joining him in his scrutiny of the portrait, and it is her ability to think outside the painting itself that points to the letters hidden in the ornate carving on the frame, letters that indeed promise to lead to the centuries-old treasure of the Letterfords:

Good friend among the stars be found
A treasure--heare the key thus bound.
Blessed be the man who lays the claime
To that enthroned within this frame.

And soon Julian and Colophon are off on a quest which takes them from secret clue to secret clue--at the tomb of Shakespeare in a church in Stratford-on-Avon, into the depths of a crypt with an ancient clockwork-driven door that almost closes on them, and to the posh offices of a private bank in London with a golden key which can open Miles Letterford's security box deposited there over three hundred years earlier, But to the cousins'  disappointment, the box is not filled with gold or jewels, holding only an old inkwell and one very old leather portfolio.

Meanwhile, Mull Letterford, accompanied by Case, Colophon's older brother, finds another series of  comic but unfortunate events that derail his meetings with the three authors with which he had  hoped to revive his business. It looks like Christmas Eve will bring no joy to Colophon's family--unless... unless that venerable portfolio might just contain a secret from Shakespeare's grave that will save the family's fortune and preserve Letterford and Sons' prestige well into the future.

Deron R. Hicks' just-published Secrets of Shakespeare's Grave (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012) is a ripsnorting, stylish mystery with an appealing but unlikely pair of puzzle-solving detectives, one which concludes with an unforeseen denouement which surprisingly doesn't include the hoped-for gold, but a treasure that is even better, and ends with the promise of yet another mystery.

Colophon,

There is no time for talk....

We were wrong.

The manuscripts were simply another clue.  I will write further.

---Julian

This is a classy mystery novel, each chapter beginning with a quote from the Bard and intriguing little illustrations which suggest the clues to follow, with memorable characters and suitably mysterious settings ranging from Mont St. Michel in 1616 to Manchester, Georgia, with stops along the way in London, Stratford-on-Avon, and New York City. Fans of The Thirty-Nine Clues series and The Enola Holmes Mysteries who enjoy cryptic literary mysteries and harrowing clues in the crypt will find Colophon Letterford a most engaging girl sleuth and look forward the next sequel, promised for 2013.

Self-Defense: The Accused: Theodore Boone Series (Book 3) by John Grisham

Theo knew it was wrong, maybe not illegal, but certainly wrong.

The line between right and wrong had always been clear; now, though, nothing was clear. The wrongs were piling on top of him. It was wrong for someone to break into his locker and plant stolen loot with the obvious goal of getting him in trouble. It was wrong for someone to stalk him, to slash his tires and throw a rock through his window. Theo had done nothing wrong, yet was now being treated like a criminal. And if Theo were to be charged by the police, another wrong would occur. Was it wrong for Theo to steal a password, all in an effort to prevent another, much larger wrong?

Could doing something wrong lead to the right result?

Theo Boone knows that someone is out to get him. Accustomed to being on the sunny side of the law and order line, Theo Boone, kid lawyer, finds himself accused of a major felony, the forcible entry and burglary of an electronics store. When his school locker appears to have been vandalized and his favorite baseball cap stolen, Theo figures it is just part of a bully's on-going harassment. Running late, he puts off reporting the theft to the school office, and when four stolen netpads are found in his locker, the police seem certain they have the right felon.

Theo deduces that the planted goods are part of the chain of events--three slashed bike tires and a rock thrown through the window of his parents' law office, obviously meant to intimidate him--and he is certain that someone is out to exact revenge upon him and through him on his parents, but who and for what? With everything coming down on him, Theo knows that the only way he is going to escape being the defendant himself in a trial for robbery is to find the real thief first.

Theo turns to his sometime mentor, his disbarred, ne'er-do-well Uncle Ike, who shrewdly deduces that someone in his school is exacting retribution for a nasty divorce case handled by his mother. But to determine which of his classmates is holding that deep a grudge requires that Theo obtain the password to his mom's secured files. Can two wrongs make a right in this case?

As in most of his adult fiction, the protagonist in Book 3 of his Theodore Boone series, Theodore Boone: The Accused (Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer) (Dutton, 2012) doesn't always play it by the book, operating in the gray areas of right and wrong, going for what he sees as the greater good. It's easy to pick holes in the author's somewhat Swiss-cheesy plotline, and it is fair to point out that often Theo behaves and talks more like one of Grisham's thirty-something heroes than a middle school kid, but Grisham is first and foremost a storyteller, and once he's laid down his premise, the reader is off and running in one of his fast-moving page-turner legal thrillers. Likened to such staples of the juvenile mystery genre as Encylopedia Brownand Nancy Drew, Theodore Boone combines the qualities of Leroy and Nancy with a generous dose of Perry Mason and a dash of Grisham's iconic renegade hero Mitch McDeere.

Oh, and as for the resolution of the case against the golf course murderer Pete Duffy, indicted by the work of Theo Boone in the series opener, Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer, readers are going to have to wait for Book 4. Accused wife murderer Pete Duffy disappears without a trace on the night before his trial opens, so we'll have to wait for the next sequel, to give our busy kid lawyer a shot at bringing this perpetrator to justice.

Out of the Mouths of Dogs: What the Dog Said by Randi Reisfeld

I wished I could grieve like a normal person, instead of feeling abandoned and--and guilty.

"Grace." Regan's voice rose over the chaos in the cages, echoing along the concrete hallway. "I think I found him! He's sooooo cute! He looks like a multi-poo!" she said. "That's what Sheena has!" Sheena Watson, queen of the high school jungle, Regan's cohort in fabulousness.

"No, no, no. Pick me!"

I spun around. In the cage behind me, a dog sat, posing as if for a portrait of canine good humor and fidelity. His shaggy gray muzzle seemed strained into something resembling a smile.

"Did you hear that?" I asked Regan.

"She didn't," the dog assured me. "You're the only one who can."

Since her police officer father's sudden death in a drive-by shooting, Grace has lost her anchor. Grace's grief is mixed with guilt, a relentless feeling that her insistence that her dad make her soccer tryouts that afternoon put him at work early and into the wrong place at the wrong moment. Now she is listeing to a pound dog and suspects she's losing her mind.

Grace, the smart one, the sister with straight As, has stopped turning in homework, stopped learning anything, stopped seeing her friends, lost in grief for the father who seemed to her the only one who understood her. Her mom throws herself into work and her books on grief management, and her sister Regan hasn't missed a beat with her friends and despite lackluster grades, is deep into scheming to get herself admitted to Parson's School of Design.

Enter Rex the rescue dog. Looking to pad her college application, Regan decides that she and Grace will adopt a shelter pooch and enroll it in the local canine companion program, becoming trainers to turn the pound puppy into a service dog for handicapped children. A born manipulator, Regan passes the actual training classes over to Grace, and Mom goes along with her lopsided plan, hoping that the dog and social involvement will draw Grace out of her self-imposed isolation.

But this rescue dog talks so that only Gracie can hear him, and what he says is making sense. Afraid to tell her family that she's having conversations with a goofy-looking mutt, Grace has no choice but to go with Regan's plan. Along the way, Grace is drawn in by Rex's infectious live-in-the-moment doggy wisdom and his amazing ability to psych out human motivations.

Rex's canine sensory equipment also come into play when Grace discovers that one of the teens in the class is JJ, the boy who may have been a witness to her father's unsolved murder, and to add to the mystery, she learns from the instructor that her own father was instrumental in getting JJ, identified as an at-risk kid because of his gang involvement, into the class. At first horrified by being forced together with someone she believes was involved in her dad's death, Grace gradually comes up with a plan, with the help of Rex's amazing abilities, to force JJ to reveal the shooter responsible for her father's shooting to the police.

Part fantasy pet tale, part mystery story, Randi Reisfeld's and H. B. Gilmour's What the Dog Said (Bloomsbury, 2012) is above all a story of one girl's grief. Grace slowly finds her way back to her own life, and with Rex's help, finds that bittersweet resolution that keeps her father a living part of that life. This funny-sad story rises above the humorous device of the talking dog story to become an insightful coming-of-age novel with appeal to a variety of young adult readers.