We read the first three books in the Mo and Dale series, and had no idea there was a fourth! The series was one of the first I ever reviewed, and I'm ashamed to say my review was quite short.
This one, as the final book in the series, reveals who Mo's Upstream River Mother is. I won't spoil it, but that was the story line that kept us reading, because it had the most emotional punch.
A treasure hunter looking for Blackbeard's treasure chest comes to Tupelo Landing, and the kids get a little adult encouragement -- and a clue to a treasure map -- to give him a run for his money. He brings with him Harm's mother, who wants to take her son away from Tupelo to the big city, where they can sing together and turn the head of a record producer or two.
But don't expect Mo and Dale to let go of their best friend so easily. They're on the lookout for when the treasure hunter uses Harm's mom to spy on their efforts to find the treasure.
They have pieces of the treasure map, offered by some adults who don't want to see the treasure hunter succeed for their own reasons. But the kid sleuths don't have all of the text that goes with it.
I won't spoil how it ends, but the kids dig in a very dangerous place and need rescuing from an unlikely source. And the sparkly ruby and emerald treasure is all it's rumored to be -- and more.
Enjoy this series! It's a great one for under the tree.
I debated whether to include this one in the Holiday Picks because it was also a candidate for October, as it features a ghost, but that month always fills up so fast with so many excellent MG horror books, and I ran out of space to run this.
This mystery is for lower elementary kiddos, a bit on the younger side, as the mystery's not terribly complicated. It features 12-year-olds JJ, who fancies himself a ghost hunter, and Penny, whose father was a proper police detective, albeit now retired, and hotel ghost-under-their-noses Emma.
JJ and Penny's parents are summoned to a free luxurious weekend at the Barclay Hotel, but in reality, they're being framed -- or at least held up as possible suspects -- for a murder. All of them had contentious dealings with the owner of the hotel, who they're told has turned up dead. (Note, no body on scene) It's up to the kids to figure out who actually killed whom. Emma poses as the daughter of the chef, although it's made perfectly clear to the reader that she, the midnight cat, the groundskeeper and others are mere shadows of what they were in life.
Along the way, JJ figures he'll catch some ghosts. The mansion is said to be haunted, and he sets up his cameras and other equipment. Penny's the realist, who doesn't believe in ghosts, at all. And Emma...she keeps popping up or disappearing into thin air, when neither JJ or Penny expect it, but for quite a while there's no hard evidence Emma's anything other than a girl who lives at the hotel.
There's a fairly big plot twist toward the end that involves identity theft and stepping into someone else's shoes, almost literally, so I won't say much more.
Enjoy this slightly spooky middle grade mystery!
And Saltwater Secrets is definitely an upper middle grade mystery, quite complicated as it's told in two different POVs through non-linear storytelling. It also features a set of rising 9th grade girls who both find crushes and settle into their growing young adulthood by the end of the book.
The mystery's not about a dead person, although that's definitely the stakes, but rather dead jellies.
The book has four sections told from alternating 14-year-old girls' Josie and Stella's POVs. Stella is the more boy-fixated of the two. She comes to the Jersey Shore after getting in trouble twice at school and under threat of a "keep your nose clean or third strike and you're out" from her divorced parents.
Josie, who's from Australia, is totally unaware one of the three T's, or boys the girls have always played with on the beach, is smitten with her, and has been, for a while. Stella's royally bored with Josie, who wants to do all the little girl things they've always done, and not really interested in attending late-night bonfires with boys. What's worse, for Josie, the Water Ice (and I still have no idea what this is, I assumed flavored ice?) place they've frequented every summer is gone, replaced by a cool, hip, health-food smoothie joint with a secret ingredient.
They step on a dead jelly fish under the pier. A bunch of them wash up dead, in fact. And a local man, mistaken for homeless when he's really a brilliant but misunderstood research scientist, mumbles about a toxin in the water, killing the jellies.
Then, the girls and the triple T's are on the pier, before the boys have to leave to make a secret delivery from a huge boat anchored off the Shore, and they think they feel the pier move. It heaves up, possibly off the pylons, with a big wave. Is it safe? What's eroding or eating away at the pylons?
And then the girls hear that their favorite singer, who's also sponsoring the new smoothie shop, is going to give a concert on the pier.
It's all subtle set-up for a fantastic mystery that involves some obscure toxicology that I thoroughly enjoyed learned about!
This is a great read for under the tree, next to the Menorah or on your classroom bookshelf.
Enjoy!
