Whodunnit? Officer Panda, Fingerprint Detective by Ashley Crowley

3:00 P.M.: OFFICER PANDA BEGINS HIS SHIFT.

3:30 P.M.: STOPS TO QUESTION FARMER BARNES.

"Good afternoon! Did you happen to notice anything unusual about those haystacks?"

Something's amiss in Office Panda's precinct!

There are some swirly smudges on Farmer Barnes' hay. And then the good policeman starts seeing them everywhere he looks! Rooftops, windows, cows.

Two panda kids report seeing the smudges in the forest, and when Officer Panda investigates, he sees smudges on the trees.... and even on the wily deer.

Who is responsible for this?

And when the good gumshoe returns home with his crime notebook bulging with infractions, he finds the mystery prints on his own front door. Inside he sees prints on the walls, window drapes and even on the cat!

WHODUNNIT?

YOUDUNNIT!

Case closed.

Yep, it's YOU, Dear Readers. You are the ones leaving your fingerprints all over this book. Author Ashley Crowley does a metafictional flip in her newest Officer Panda: Fingerprint Detective (Harper, 2015). Everybody's doing it these days, upbraiding (or sometimes urging) their readers about turning the page, and pressing a button (or NOT), and Crowley's droll little detective has got his perpetrator collared. Crowley's whimsical black and white line drawings, accented only with touches of red and blue, are the main attraction, right down to the tell-tale fingerprint on the moon visible through Officer Panda's bedroom window.

Savvy readers on top of this trend who adore Herve Tullet's mighty best-selling metafiction, Press Here, and Mix It Up! or Patrick McDonnell's A Perfectly Messed-Up Story will definitely get the joke here. As Kirkus quips, "Officer Panda's investigation is not a great introduction to the justice system, but for readers with the right sense of humor, it has plenty of other delights."

Creepy-Crawly Cop: Bug Patrol by Denise Dowling Mortensen

4:53 "EMERGENCY!
REPORT OF MOTHER LOSING FLEA.

"DOGGIE SHOOK
A BIT TOO HARD.
LITTLE FLEA
LOST IN YARD!"

Wee-o! WEE-0! WEE-0! WOOO!

BUG MOBILE COMING THROUGH!

This is the city. Officer Bob is on the job!

Behind the wheel of his cruiser, Officer Bob begins his shift writing a citation to a gang of urban ants swarming in a crude donut-kidnaping caper. When those ant antics are calmed, it’s on to the mall, where hot-rodding beetles are using the parking lot for drag racing, bending fenders right and left.

Tempers cooled and the rowdy drivers cited, Officer Bob scarcely has a moment before breaking up some rough-riding motorcyclist spiders. And then comes the call....

3:25.

“Sidewalk swell,
Picket line.
At Roach Hotel.

Wee-O! WEE-0! WEE-0! WOO!

It’s an OCCUPY ROACH HOTEL in progress as the roaches demonstrate against unsafe living conditions. “Unsafe for My Babies” proclaims one picket sign, as the roach parents protest outside the offending establishment. Officer Bob steps in, judiciously arranging for the relocation of the creepy crawlers’ families to the Paradise Landfill.

Our six-legged cop hopes to finish his shift with an Amber Alert search for the missing flea-babe in the grass, but no sooner is the flea family’s unit  reunited than it’s off to answer a call complaining of partying crickets disturbing the evening peace!

”They just want to
chirp and leap.
Neighbors want
a good-night’s sleep!

There are a million stories in the city for Officer Bob Bug, in Denise Dowling Mortensen’s latest picture book, Bug Patrol (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012). Illustrator Cece Bell’s childlike blackline drawings of lawbreaking creepy-crawling citizens of Bug City are artfully laid out with Mortensen’s perky quatrains, with their repeated refrain of WEE-Os and ”Officer Bob coming throughs” to encourage listener participation..

For those annual early childhood “community helpers” units, (as well as beginning reader fare) pair this one with Michelle Meadows’ Traffic Pups (see my review here) for first responder fun.