Mystery
Pointe, Claw
Amber J. Keyser
Jessie Vale dances in an elite ballet program. She has to be perfect to land a spot with the professional company. When Jessie is cast in an animalistic avant-garde production, her careful composure cracks wide open. Nothing has felt more dangerous.Meanwhile, her friend Dawn McCormick's world is full of holes. She wakes in strange places, bruised, battered, and unable to speak. The doctors are out of ideas.These childhood friends are both running out of time. Jessie has one shot at her ballet dream. Dawn's blackouts are getting worse. At every turn, they crash into the many ways girls are watched, judged, used, and discarded. Should they play it safe or go feral?
Book Details
Recommended Books
The Edge of the Universe
Shaun David Hutchinson
From the author of We Are the Ants comes “another winner” (Booklist, starred review) about a boy who believes the universe is slowly shrinking as things he remembers are being erased from others’ memories.Tommy and Ozzie have been best friends since the second grade, and boyfriends since eighth. They spent countless days dreaming of escaping their small town—and then Tommy vanished. More accurately, he ceased to exist, erased from the minds and memories of everyone who knew him. Everyone except Ozzie. Ozzie doesn’t know how to navigate life without Tommy, and soon he suspects that something else is going on: that the universe is shrinking. When Ozzie is paired up with the reclusive and secretive Calvin for a physics project, it’s hard for him to deny the feelings developing between them, even if he still loves Tommy. But Ozzie knows there isn’t much time left to find Tommy—that once the door closes, it can’t be opened again. And he’s determined to keep it open as long as possible.
Book Details
Recommended Books
Effie Starr Zook Has One More Question
Martha Freeman
“An excellent addition to middle grade collections.” —School Library Journal (starred review) After being shipped off to stay with her aunt and uncle in Nowheresville, Pennsylvania, city girl Effie Starr Zook stumbles upon a mystery that leads her to an old family feud in this “accessible and exciting” (School Library Journal, starred review).A rich girl from New York City, Effie Starr Zook isn’t afraid of much. When her parents go on a dangerous round-the-world adventure in a solar airplane, she’s packed off to her aunt and uncle’s farm for the summer. Expecting boredom, she runs smack dab into a family secret. Why does the neighbor kid want to avoid her? What are her aunt and uncle so worried about? And what does “bad blood” mean, anyway? Effie’s got a brand-new bicycle, time on her hands, and an unlimited capacity for asking questions. With these, she sets out to uncover whatever it is the grownups are hiding. Along the way, she’ll contend with crackpot politics, serve coffee in a bookstore café, and learn more than she bargained for about her famous great-grandfather, the inventor of the barf bag. Fast-paced and funny, this is a story about having the courage to find out who you really are. Look out, world—when Effie Starr Zook has questions, she won’t take no for an answer!
Book Details
Recommended Books
Under Locker and Key
Allison K. Hymas
Eleven-year-old Jeremy Wilderson teams up with his rival crime fighter to stop the stealing spree that’s wreaking havoc on Scottsville Middle School in this action-packed MAX novel.Jeremy Wilderson is not a thief. In fact, he is his middle school’s one and only retrieval specialist. Confiscated cell phones, stolen lunch money—he’ll discretely retrieve it before the last bell rings. Business is good, and if it weren’t for the meddling of preteen private investigator Becca Mills, he’d be happier than a gym teacher on dodgeball day. But a new job shatters his comfortable lifestyle. Now, thanks to Jeremy, the master key to the schools’ lockers is in the hands of an aspiring crime kingpin who doesn’t exactly have Jeremy’s strong moral character. Soon not even combination locks can protect the students’ textbooks and jackets. Retrieving the key is too big a job for one crime fighter, and only one person wants the key returned as much as Jeremy does: Becca Mills. Lockers are being robbed, the teachers are looking for the culprit, and the only person Jeremy can turn to is the girl who most wants to see him in the principal’s office. Will Jeremy be able to trust Becca enough to get the key back in the right hands? Or could he end up in detention until the end of high school instead?
Book Details
Recommended Books
Vampires on the Run: A Quinnie Boyd Mystery
C. M. Surrisi
In the months after Quinnie Boyd cracked the mystery of her missing teacher, she expected life in her small Maine town to snap back to normal. But two writers from New York City have arrived in Maiden Rock, and there's something not quite right about them. Sure, Ceil and Edgar are pale. And they dress in all black. And they don't go near the sunlight. But could they really be vampires? To find out, Quinnie turns to Dominic a new kid in town who's an expert on everything geeky. Together, they'll risk their necks to find an answer . . .
Book Details
Recommended Books
#2 The Palace of Memory
Patricia Moffett, Julian Sedgwick
Danny Woo has just escaped from the jaws of death. But he's still haunted by the suspicious deaths of his parents, who were the star performers in a radical traveling circus, the Mysterium. When he discovers that the Mysterium is re-forming in Barcelona without him he's devastated. But after learning that the Mysterium's enemies may be active in Barcelona, he rushes to warn his friends.Could there be a traitor within the company itself? If Danny wants to live long enough to find the answers, he will need all the skills his parents taught him. He senses that everything is linked to his parents' deaths . . . and to the clues they left behind.
Book Details
Recommended Books
Code Red, series
After nailing the murderer of her addict mom and proving that her detractors are full of it, seventeen-year-old Faith Flores is back for another kick-ass science mystery. She's proud to be chosen for a summer internship at a research lab in Santa Fe, New Mexico, but once she arrives, complications abound. For one thing, Santa Fe is the birthplace of the father she's never met, and for another, she clashes with a local environmentalist trying to pull the plug on the genetically modified chiles her new boss is engineering. She and violin prodigy, Clem, learn of a new teen drug called liquid gold while discreetly researching the family angle. The chip on Faith's shoulder is still there, but so is her determination to uncover the truth when a girl she meets at a party dies from an overdose of liquid gold.
Book Details
Recommended Books
Dead Last
Carla and Sasha are the daughters of an Olympic Champion and because of that they are expected by their family to compete in running, swimming and athletics and win. Until Sasha goes for a run on her own and disappears. No one knows what happened to her, or why she disappeared.Carla is left to compete on her own, until she is approached by a boy she doesn’t like, who warns her to stop competing, as her life might be in danger. Carla thinks it a cruel joke… but is it?
Book Details
Recommended Books
Case at Adenwood Academy
Abbey and her tomboy sister Case think all their dreams have come true when their family win the lottery. What they didn’t expect was to be sent to an exclusive boarding school with girls that just don’t like them. Desperate to get themselves home again, the girls go on a mission to get themselves into trouble, until a new friend goes missing and they may just have the only clue to what happened.
Book Details
Recommended Books
Skunks Dance
Spivey Spillane's grandmammy always said there were only two good reasons to kill a man -- for cheating on a woman, and for serving drinks to a Yankee. She may have had a hand in winning the Revolutionary War, but even she never met the likes of Alabama Sam. Sam robs a bank under Spillane's name, casts him in an obscene one-man play wearing only a pink tutu, and starts a betting pool on how many wieners he has. Despite the indignities Spillane suffers, he chases Sam across Gold-Rush-era California because Sam is the only one who knows the location of a hidden fortune buried somewhere in the hills. Meanwhile in the present, seventeen-year-olds Amanda and Jet have rekindled an old childhood rivalry. Amanda is obsessed with finding the treasure of her infamous ancestor Spivey Spillane. Jet and Amanda's feud comes to a head over an extended incident involving a broken window, an exploded car, and a charge of sexual assault with a candy Batman. Jet vows that he is going to find to Spillane's gold before Amanda does, but it doesn't take them long to realize that someone may have come this way already -- someone who wants the past to stay buried. Inspired by the rickety world of 1960s British-made Westerns, SKUNKS DANCE is a tale of revenge, greed, and men in tutus.
Book Details
Recommended Books