While I wasn’t entirely sure what the focus of this blog would be when I started it — I knew there would be impossible crimes, but had no idea otherwise — I’d have been surprised if you told me I’d end up doing so much reading of and writing about mysteries for 9 to 12 year-olds.
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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.
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I had hoped to diversify these Minor Felonies posts this month, and to bring in some new authors who might produce well-structured juvenile detective fiction. But, well, that didn’t work out, and so instead I guess I’ll just have to return to Stuart Gibbs’ FunJungle, perhaps the best series of detective novels for 8 to 12 year-olds currently on the market.
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It was after finishing Stuart Gibbs’ Moon Base Alpha trilogy that I turned my eye upon his FunJungle novels, wondering if he brought the same sense of open-handed clewing and enjoyable detection to his other books. And, as it happened, he had just published sixth FunJungle title Tyrannosaurus Wrecks (2020), in which a Tyrannosaurus skull disappears from muddy surrounds with no footprints to account for its removal. Colour me intrigued…
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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.
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In the back of my mind when I started The Invisible Event was the idea that exactly half of what I’d post about would feature impossible crimes, locked room mysteries, and/or miracle problems — and although this proportion started an irreversible slide after the first 500 or so posts, the impossible crime remains my first love.
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I was very much looking forward to celebrating this review as my one hundredth post tagged as a juvenile mystery, making a full century of detective fiction for younger readers on this blog. But then it turns out that this is, like, the 104th and the one hundredth was Peak Peril (2022) by Sharna Jackson back in July. So. Onwards and upwards.
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Big Game (2015) by Stuart Gibbs represents a third visit to FunJungle, the gigantic Texan zoo owned by billionaire J.J. McCracken where 12 year-old Teddy Fitzroy lives with his primatologist mother and photographer father. And, as the title would suggest, it seems something beyond animal conservation is on someone’s mind.
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Expanding on a book by writing a sequel is a tricky proposition; you need to retain what made the first one (hopefully!) good and yet also give something new to make such an expansion worthwhile. Poached (2014), the second entry in Stuart Gibbs’ FunJungle series, thankfully does some very good work in building on the world of first book Belly Up (2010)…and throws in an impossibly-vanished koala for good measure to spice up the intrigue.
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“Can you call it homicide if the victim is a hippo?” asks the back cover of this first entry in Stuart Gibbs’ FunJungle series and, from a purely Latin perspective, no you can’t. However, the brilliance of Gibbs’ endeavour here is how much he adheres to the fundamental form of the murder mystery despite this core difference.
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The Invisible Event 