Smart Sleuthing

I wanted desperately to expose my 8 year-old son, Coleman, to something more than the A-Z Mysteries. Not that these are not wonderful and worthwhile books, they are. However, what I will inevitably one day pronounce when he is dating I recently said regarding reading: “Coleman, there are many fish in the sea.” In other words, try a lot of different books to experience what’s out there. After taking my advice, and broadening his book horizons so to speak, he found Saxby Smart: Private Detective in The Curse Of The Ancient Mask and Other Case Files by Simon Cheshire with pictures by R.W. Alley, Roaring Press from Roaring Brook Press.

According to Coleman, “this great book is about a boy named Saxby Smart who attends a local school called St. Egbert’s. The book contained a total of three separate stories (aka Case Files) about mysteries that happened in the town where Saxby lived. There are two people he constantly relies on.

“One of them is named Muddy, a tech genius and the other is named Izzy. She is a keen researcher always looking up facts for Saxby. Muddy creates things out of old scrap junk he finds and makes them into amazing inventions like The Whitehouse Bike 2000 which can go really, really fast. (I think I know why my inventor son relates to this character so well). Website searcher for Saxby, Izzy looks up all the facts like how much the golden clasp is worth (see page 121 for The Clasp of Doom).” Coleman liked The Curse of the Ancient Mask best, “although,” according to him, “the others were pretty darned good, too!”

“In The Curse of the Ancient Mask, Saxby is friends with this tall girl from school and her dad is in a company that makes things. His rival company, Posispark set her dad up because they know he likes to buy souvenirs whereever he goes. He goes to Japan on business. Before he leaves he gets this mask from a store and once home, for some odd reason every time he announces something to his family that his company is building, Posispark somehow get the idea and starts building it. To find out what is going on, Saxby steps in to investigate, but you will have to read this book to find out his discovery.” The drawings totally added to how much he enjoyed the book and he’s already asking when the next book will come out! Fishing is good!