Lion Down (2019) is the fifth book in Stuart Gibbs’ FunJungle series and, with previous entry Panda-Monium (2017) being one of the best juvenile mysteries I’ve yet read in this Minor Felonies undertaking, expectations were high.

When King, the beloved pet dog of radio personality and agitator Lincoln Stone, is found dead on Stone’s property, suspicion quickly fastens on a mountain lion that is known to roam the woodland thereabouts. Upon investigating the scene of the, er, caninicide, however, a local wildlife warden isn’t necessarily convinced that a mountain lion is responsible — the lack of animal tracks, for one, implies that some other party might be guilty. And so, since Stone’s property overlooks J.J. McCracken’s gigantic FunJungle animal park — and since 13 year-old Teddy Fitzroy has acquired something of a reputation as someone who is able to solve animal-based mysteries — Teddy is recruited to try and get to the bottom of things.

One immediately pleasing thing about Teddy’s involvement is that Gibbs isn’t simply resorting to a knee-jerk ‘all animal life is precious and should be preserved’ soapbox-style narrative:

I didn’t want to be part of condemning a mountain lion to death, but of there really was one close by with a taste for pet dogs then maybe putting it down would truly be the right thing to do.

Indeed, almost from the off the evidence suggests that the lion, christened Rocket by local wildlife wardens, can’t have been involved: the tracking beacon on her collar shows that she was nowhere near Stone’s property at the time of the death, and the physical evidence simply doesn’t stack up in that direction. The problem Teddy and his girlfriend Summer McCracken face is that, unless they’re able to prove who or what was responsible for killing King, Rocket will be blamed anyway and potentially hunted to death by the trigger-happy local types Lincoln Stone is expert at inciting to adopt his points of view.

The mystery here is good — indeed, both mysteries are as, in common with Gibbs’ other books there’s a secondary plot concerning the poisoning of the FunJungle giraffes — but Lion Down really excels as a look at the distorting nature of media and the way people can manipulate their own image. At a very basic level, there Lincoln Stone’s presentation of himself to his fanbase…

“The guy’s entire image was designed to attract a certain type of viewer. He’s supposed to be a red-blooded, all-American alpha male. The kind of guy who likes to drink beer, race cars, and kill wild animals. But that’s not what Lincoln Stone used to be like. In fact, his name isn’t even Lincoln Stone. It’s Farley Turkmeister. And he was born in Beverly Hills.”

…and the half-truths he surrounds himself with: the public believe that King is a Golden Retriever, since Stone had a very public photoshoot with such a dog, when in fact he’s a bichon frisé, and by all accounts treated very poorly by his supposed loving owner. Nevertheless, Stone trades in the type of powderkeg-stamping rhetoric which is, depressingly, becoming increasingly recognisable these days:

It was even more disturbing when Lincoln took on serious issues with the same cavalier attitude, shooting his mouth off without thinking about the consequences. For example, he had recently suggested that if illegally crossing into the country was punishable by death, then we’d have much less illegal immigration. Lots of his listeners has really liked that idea, and a few had even gone down to the Rio Grande river with the intent of shooting anyone they presumed to be crossing the border.

While the problem represented by Stone would be sufficient to fill out an ‘evils of media’ plot, the whole thing is, inevitably, a little simplified, and Gibbs deserves huge credit for shading in a slightly subtler hue when it comes to social media and its role in the lives of, especially, young and famous people. 14 year-old Summer, as the daughter of a billionaire, is a public figure whether she likes or not, and her mother Kandace almost expects her to lean into this more than Summer is willing to:

“If you want to make money, there are easier ways to do it. You’re famous. There are plenty of companies that would pay you thousands of dollars just to tweet about their products.”

“That’s not work,” Summer said dismissively. “That’s just trading on the family name.”

Between these two considerations, Gibbs is very adroit at stirring in potential complications which don’t always assume the best of his characters: Teddy doesn’t shy away from the fact that the notoriously back-handed J.J. might, after all, be in some way behind the frenzy surrounding Rocket, motivated by fear for the safety of FunJungle with a legitimately wild animal roaming so nearby. And the threat that the hunters represent is neatly limned, too, with one of a handful of very good action sequences bringing the risk to people around FunJungle — and the gung-ho foolishness of local hunters who might, for instance, shoot a bulldozer mistaking it for a mountain lion — home to the reader. This is, too, perhaps the first time that virtually al the threads of Teddy’s universe have been tied in to one story: see the conduct of the dense-but-intimidating Barksdale twins, or the folding in of Teddy’s school’s vice principal to events, as indications of Gibbs working in a more joined-up way that demonstrates far tighter world building than we’ve seen before.

Also, as always, there are some good jokes along the way:

“Mountain lions don’t eat pandas,” I said. It probably wasn’t true, but I was trying to be reassuring.

“Why not?” Pete asked.

“They don’t like Chinese food.”

And, again as usual with Gibbs’ intelligently-considered plots, there’s an ecological message behind all the fun. To see habitat loss as a threat to wild animals addressed so clear-sightedly in a book which concerns the murder of a bichon frisé is no small feat, and while the idea that humans are the invasive species is not a new idea to the adults among us, Gibbs is great at making these points clearly and fairly when presenting it to the younger audience he has in his sights. The only thing in the whole book that didn’t work for me was the character of Lily, who is motivated by animal rights but also abandons two minors so that she can go and commit an act of criminal trespass. I think Gibbs himself didn’t really know what to do with her, either, because she vanishes from the book at the two-thirds point and is the only element not really considered in the clever layering mentioned above.

As usual, then, FunJungle garnering a “reputation as a place where chaos occurs on a regular basis” provides the backdrop for a swift-moving mystery with some fascinating nuggets (animals that chew the cud can’t vomit), some superb visual metaphors (“It looked like someone had yelled ‘Fire!’ at the Oscars.”), great sequences of superb action (it opens with perhaps the best piece of slapstick I’ve read in a long time) and, this time around, a surprisingly moving and morally complex resolution to the core mystery. This just might be the best mystery series for younger readers being written today, and I for one remain delighted that I stumbled upon Gibbs and his writing when I did.

~

Stuart Gibbs’ mysteries for younger readers:

FunJungle

1. Belly Up (2010)
2. Poached (2014)
3. Big Game (2015)
4. Panda-Monium (2017)
5. Lion Down (2019)
6. Tyrannosaurus Wrecks (2020)
7. Bear Bottom (2021)
8. Whale Done (2023)
9. All Ears (2025)

Moon Base Alpha

1. Space Case (2014)
2. Spaced Out (2016)
3. Waste of Space (2018)