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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