I cannot remember how I stumbled across Stuart Gibbs’ Space Case (2014), but whatever combination of events brought it to my attention is to be thanked for the 11 books of his I’ve now read, eight of which are in the FunJungle corpus, which is very likely the best juvenile mystery series being written today.

Whale Done (2023) is the eighth FunJungle novel, and takes out teenage sleuth Teddy Fitzroy away from the actual FunJungle zoo again — seriously, if there’s much more chaos at FunJungle itself, it’s getting shut down — to the California coast and the rich, beautiful, and once again rich people of Hollywood. And here, in an exclusive beachside neighbourhood known as the Colony, he’ll of course stumble into trouble once more, this time bringing the ire of international business, and more than a few influential wealthy types, upon himself.

Following the destruction of the shoddy lodgings he has at FunJugle, Teddy joins his girlfriend Summer — daughter of FunJungle’s billionaire owner J.J. McCracken, Sir Not Appearing in This Film — and her mother Kandace in California, where a dead whale has been washed up on the beach outside the homes where Kandace’s friend Binka lives in the house she claimed from her husband in their rancorous divorce. While the wealthy Californians who make up the Colony want the whale moved with no questions asked, certain authorities have a rather vested interest in establishing how it came to die in the first place.

“It’s not like we’re going to find stab wounds or a giant martini glass with a residue of arsenic.”

Additionally, a surfer — admittedly, a somewhat, er, alternatively-living surfer — claims that sand is being stolen from beaches up and down the coast, which Teddy is aware has serious consequences for local fauna…but the small matter remains of why someone would do this. Can Teddy solve the mystery of the exploding whale and find the sand thief? Oh, did I not mention that the whale explodes before anyone gets a chance to examine it? Yeah, that’s an added complication.

The real success of Gibbs’ series here is how acutely he ties in concerns for the environment and the creatures we share the world with, never losing sight of the mysteries at the core of his books but, without ever preaching, making clear the complex nature of caring for nature alongside human expansion. Here, he sets his scope even higher by looking at the contrary drivers behind so much international trade in the likes of oil, such as when it is suspected that a nearby oil rig might be leaking and so have contributed to the whale’s death.

“It’s expensive to shut down the rig and do repairs. And it’s bad public relations to reveal that the pipes are leaking.”

It’s clear where Gibbs’ sympathies lie, but he always does such a good job of presenting the other side of his argument, confronting it not as a simple Those People Are Wrong jeremiad but instead making clear the subtleties involved in trying to fix, repeal, or combat anything of any meaningful size and momentum. This is, like, hard to do for grown up books, and one of the major wins for this series is how light a touch Gibbs evinces in making these points over and over again with various aspects of modern life in mind.

The list of potential suspects was too big, too powerful, too international, and almost impossible to pursue.

This will sound weird, but with its focus on the complexities of international shipping and the absence of an examinable crime scene, Whale Done reminded me at times — don’t laugh — of The Loss of the ‘Jane Vosper’ (1936) by Freeman Wills Crofts, since Teddy, Summer, and their allies must adopt an almost Humdrum approach in trying to narrow down, single out, and pursue each possible thread as they occur…all with exceptionally limited resources and practically no outside assistance.

In addition to the criminal element, Whale Done also utilises its California setting to explore the two-sided nature of fame and those who pursue it, with Binka keen to introduce the young, attractive, and popular Summer to the world of influencers and easy money. Again, Gibbs is good at looking at this two ways, including absurdities like Biggles the Narcoleptic Dachshund, and it’s an increasingly relevant aspect of life for a lot of the target audience for this book, and so it’s no surprise that another excellent job is done with this element. And the way it comes to drive a wedge between Teddy and Summer, too, is realistically explored, with both his feelings and hers entirely justified and yet seemingly at an impasse.

Honestly, the only part of this that rang false for me is Teddy telling us that the events of the eight books so far in this series have all taken place in under a year. Everything else, including the answers to the puzzles, the way we can’t necessarily trust what people say to our faces because of what they’ll say behind our backs, the difficulties of trying to juggle personal and professional aspects of fame, and the obligations we have to the planet and species we share it with — the late revelation of a grunion-loving flunky is really rather charming — are all handled with sensitivity, skill, and genuine care for each of the aspects woven into the web. This is top-tier writing, and not to be missed.

Given that Gibbs diversifies his writing among various series, I wonder how much more FunJungle we’ll get. A ninth book, All Ears (2025), is out later this year and then we’ll just have to wait and see. But, if you or someone you know has an interest in juvenile mysteries, I honestly do not know of a better series being written in the genre, and one with such a keen eye on what it means to truly care for the planet and each other. The mysteries are superb, the characters easy to like, the writing slides by so easily that you’re suddenly a hundred pages deep and so caught up in what’s happening…anything better than this would be really, truly exceptional.

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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)