When sirens blare outside of her upscale New York City high rise, fifteen-year-old Tandy Angel believes it is just the sounds of the city … That is, until two police detectives show up at her door, demanding entry into the apartment she shares with her family. The home quickly turns... Read More
The best mysteries give a reader all the clues needed to solve the crime. The best mysteries are full of surprises that keep a reader guessing and wondering and turning pages as fast as possible. The best mysteries end with a solution that ties up loose ends and makes... Read More
When Ted and his older sister, Kat, get a free ticket from a stranger to ride the London Eye, the huge observation wheel, they give it to their visiting thirteen-year-old cousin, Salim. They track his capsule as the wheel makes it orbit, but when it lands and the passengers disembark,... Read More
Meet Yorkshire terrier detective Samuel Blackthorne as seen through the eyes of his chronicler, friend, and fellow canine, Edward R. Smithfield, a retired veterinarian. In their first thrilling case together, they come to the assistance of elegant greyhound, Molly Kirkpatrick, who seeks their help to find out why her brother,... Read More
In 1840, with more of the children falling ill in their isolated little village of Clifton, Indiana, Jessie's ma takes her into the woods to look for herbs. Ma has been acting secretive and strange, but what she now tells Jessie is incomprehensible. It seems that Clifton isn't an ordinary... Read More
Sixteen-year-old twins Lia and Alice Milthorpe are horrorstruck to find their father dead by unknown causes in their house's Dark Room, the room in which their deceased mother used to live. But his death pales in comparison to the dark events that follow Lia the next few days: her sister... Read More
Things That Are Normal: Sixth grader, Miranda, lives on the Upper West Side with her single parent mom, a paralegal. She and Mom's boyfriend, Richard, AKA Mr. Perfect, are helping Mom practice for her appearance in three weeks (on April 27, 1979) on the TV game show "The $20,000 Pyramid,"... Read More
Nick's biology teacher, Mrs. Bunny Starch, nearly six feet tall, with died blonde hair, bright violet eye shadow, and polyester pantsuits, is the most feared teacher at the Truman School in Naples, Florida. Nick's friend, Marta, still has nightmares since she threw up in class and Mrs. Starch assigned her... Read More
Wow! WHAT a heart-thumping adventure I had the day I read this spectacular collection of twelve adventures of Gilgamesh. Based on seventh century B.C. Assyrian clay tablets that recorded the legend of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk in Mesopotamia (now Iraq) sometime between 3200 B.C. and 2700 B.C, this epic is... Read More
It's 1939, and in London, it seems as if war with Hitler is imminent. Dr. James Hamilton, a dedicated, low-paid London doctor and a widower, is reluctantly sending away his only child, eleven-year-old Tally, on scholarship to Delderton, a boarding school in the south of England, to escape the expected... Read More
“It’s overwhelming. A city’s worth of angry faces staring at me like I’m a wicked criminal—which, I promise you, I’m not.” The narrator of the prologue is 15-year-old Wisteria Allgood as she stands with her 17-year-old brother, Whitney, in a large stadium, facing the pitiless crowd, awaiting their... Read More
This captivating and gritty novel, narrated by Samuel Collier, one of the boys who came to Jamestown, will not just turn kids on to reading, but American history as well.In his clear-eyed, harrowing account of the first year of the Jamestown Settlement, eleven-year-old orphan Samuel accompanies Captain John Smith to... Read More
Marvin, a resourceful and talented beetle with a shiny black shell, lives with his parents in a damp cupboard below the kitchen sink of a New York City apartment. While Marvin doesn't much care for the human owner, sharp-tongued Mrs. Pompaday, a high-powered real estate agent, he does like her... Read More
"I have to show you something," skinny, red-haired Luke tells his friend, Heather. With his mother away for the evening, he's invited her over to share a secret. Heather loves secrets. When he pulls the sealed rectangle of black wax paper from his desk drawer, though, she feels herself go... Read More
For youthful readers with a taste for that grand master of sleuthing Sherlock Holmes, here is a treat --- a clever imagining of what life might have been like for the young fictional sleuth. About to begin his summer vacation from boarding school, the fourteen-year-old Sherlock learns that due to... Read More
Action and adventure abound in this ninth and final installment of Anthony Horowitz’s thrilling Alex Rider series. After eight dangerous and daring missions, the teen spy has come to his last. But this mission is like no other. The danger is greater, the stakes higher, the villains deadlier, as Alex... Read More
WARNING: If you and your teen reader are squeamish, violence-averse, or are looking for something light-hearted or romantic, please go look elsewhere at ReadKiddoRead for a great book tip. Otherwise, if you – or that teen – can stand a gripping, action-packed, downright scary thriller, well, in that case... Read More
This may sound strange but this is a novel about a gruesome serial killer that manages to be … quite funny. Really. A Louisiana teen named Rory Deveaux transfers to a London boarding school for her senior year because her parents, academics, have taken university positions in England. But Rory’s... Read More
Fiver has a vision that the warren he and the other rabbits live in will soon be covered in blood. A small group of rabbits, Bigwig, Blackberry, Holly, Pipkin, and more, led by Fiver’s brother, Hazel, heed Fiver’s warnings and they set out to find a new warren. The group... Read More
Aboard the gargantuan airship, Aurora, riding high above the Pacificus, heading from Sydney to Lionsgate City, 15-year-old cabin boy, Matt Cruse, helps to rescue an unconscious man in a hot air balloon that is listing in the night sky. The sixty-year-old pilot, Benjamin Malloy, who had been attempting to float... Read More
Young pickpocket Ludlow Fitch manages to escape from the dank and squalid basement where the notorious tooth surgeon of Old Goat's Alley, Barton Gumbroot, plans to extract the boy's teeth for money, assisted by Ludlow’s own drunken and larcenous parents. There's no place he can hide in the City, so... Read More
Now you don't have to wait until you're older to appreciate the dark, hip, wiseguy first person detective style of Dashiell Hammett in The Maltese Falcon and Raymond Chandler in The Big Sleep. Move over Bogart, now there's Matt Stevens on the job, a worthy successor... Read More
Thirteen-year-old Gilda Joyce has been interested in surveillance ever since reading Harriet the Spy back in elementary school. One of her plans for her boring summer vacation is to continue spying on Plaid Pants, AKA Hector Flack, who works at the convenience store and whom Gilda thinks could be a... Read More
For stealing a famous basketball player's sneakers, overweight, unlucky, but innocent Stanley Yelnats, is sentenced to hot, desolate Camp Green Lake in Texas, a detention center for bad boys. Every day each of the teen inmates must dig a hole five feet around and five feet deep in the bone... Read More
“ARE YOU A GIFTED CHILD LOOKING FOR SPECIAL OPPORTUNITIES?” That newspaper ad brings together four resourceful and multitalented children, all of whom are orphans or alone in the world, to become secret agents for Mr. Benedict, a genius who has uncovered a nefarious international mind-control plot. There's Reynie Muldoon, whose... Read More
Mild-mannered watchmaker Hermux Tantamoq is a quiet guy for a mouse. He likes nothing better than to fix clocks and watches, and then go home for a nice pot of soup and the company of his pet ladybug, Terfle. Bliss for Hermux is his ten a.m. break for coffee and... Read More
“Before I tell you about the biggest fish in the sea and how it tried to kill me and then ended up saving my life, first you got to know about the leaky boat, ‘cause it all began right there.” Now that is one great first sentence and it pulls... Read More