Post-2001, doesn’t a title like Attack on the Tower of London (2004), with the associated implications of terrorism, sound a little beyond the calling of a juvenile ice hockey team?

Suffice to say, this, the nineteenth entry in the Screech Owls series by Roy MacGregor, is my final foray into the series, and it has about the same mix of insane and quotidian as the previous two I’ve read. We start with excessive descriptions of torture in the Camber of Horrors in Madame Tussaud’s waxwork museum…

The body of [Guy] Fawkes hung from a rope — his naked skin slashed by knives and whips…

…and then it’s off to an inline hockey game — which I think means it’s played on hard ground wearing what I’d call rollerblades rather than on ice while wearing ice skates — since this is the reason that the Canadian Screech Owls are in London.

There is, as seems to be the case with these books, a lot of travelogue, with trips to London hotspots and people getting excited about Prince Harry — aah, how times change. Then they meet a completely legit-seeming man called Wolfe who takes waaaay too much interest in them and ends up — spoilers, I guess — planting C4 explosive in their helmets so that they can be detonated while they’re in the Tower of London, I think? Honestly, I’m not entirely sure; there was a lot of hockey in this one.

Disappointingly, the attempts to work in some intelligent reasoning seen in Murder at Hockey Camp (1997), where earlier events were steps on the way to providing a semi-satisfying solution, here we’re left with word-association — a wolf is like a fox and fox sounds like Fawkes…so there must be some sort of attack planned…and, no, I’m not kidding — as a seemingly watertight way to reason that someone honestly intended to detonate the skulls of some teenagers because something something royal family something Gunpowder Plot something.

I appreciate I’m solidly three decades older and significantly more interested in reading than the intended audience of these books, but I’d like to think that by the early 2000s we had a little more of a handle on how to write in interesting series for reluctant readers. MacGregor clearly deserves some credit, because he wrote 30 of these and so, one likes to imagine, they found an audience to justify their continued existence, but on this evidence I’m relieved that I passed up the opportunity to buy 20-odd of them and opted only for the three which are now on this blog.

Beyond that, I don’t know what else to say. These books are wisely kept short so that MacGregor is able to capitalise on the rapidly-diminishing interest of the unwilling audience they were intended for, and I’m guessing there’s about as much interest in this review from my audience as there would have been in these books from those people. So let’s also keep this short, eh?

Happy Tuesday, everyone who got this far; I hope you’re enjoying your current read, and I’ll see you on Thursday for Enemy Unseen (1945) by Freeman Wills Crofts.