Sometimes what you really need is a team of clever kids (or young adults, I guess) to solve a crime—so today’s stack features a couple different Scooby Gangs figuring out thefts, murders, and one magical curse. Let’s check out these meddling kids!
Theft of the Ruby Lotus by Sayantani Dasgupta
Ria Bailey is not happy. Her mom had been acting kind of shady before she apparently resigned her Metropolitan Museum job and made plans to move them to a small town in Germany. And now a ruby—stolen from the hilt of a famous Indian sword at the museum—has turned up in the mail, addressed to Ria’s mom. Was her mom involved in some sort of art heist?
Ria and her two friends—tech whiz Miracle and super-activist Annie—conveniently have an overnight field trip to the museum, so they make plans to break into the East Asian wing, somehow return the jewel to the display, and maybe get her mom’s job back so she doesn’t have to move to Germany. But, of course, things aren’t that easy: along the way they run into some scary-looking women (also part of the art thieves ring?), a really cute boy (can they trust him?), and the famous tech billionaire whose company is in charge of all the museum’s security systems.
The story overall was fun, but it felt pretty obvious to me (as an adult, at least) that Ria, who narrates the story and tells a lot of her inner thoughts, was frequently jumping to conclusions about things. When the ruby arrives in the mail, she immediately assumes her mom is a criminal. When she sees this cute boy outside the museum, her heart goes all gooey—well, she’s kind of all over the place when it comes to him—and in each encounter she makes a lot of assumptions about who people are and what they’re up to. In the end, the three girls do manage to save the day, but it’s almost despite being quite wrong about nearly everyone they encounter!
Dasgupta says in the afterword that the story was inspired by The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, a classic tale involving two kids hiding out in the Metropolitan Museum to solve a mystery, but set in the modern day. Theft of the Ruby Lotus also has a very diverse cast, not only the kids themselves but the many people they encounter in New York City as they try to get to the bottom of the mystery. It’s a big celebration of immigrant culture, and one of the story’s central themes is the repatriation of artwork and cultural artifacts.
Arcana: The Cursed Fate by Sam Prentice-Jones
Arcana: The Cursed Fate is the sequel to Arcana: The Lost Heirs, which I wrote about in this Stack Overflow column last year. (It’s not out until June, but since The Lost Heirs ended on a cliffhanger, I couldn’t wait to read it as soon as the advance copy arrived!) It’s about an organization of witches called the Arcana, and in particular a group of five young witches who are trying to figure out a curse that seems to have been triggered when Eli, the fifth one, was found in a small town and invited to join the Arcana. The higher-ups seem to know more, but they’ve left the younger witches in the dark.
The second book picks up the pace, and we soon find out what caused the curse, and this magical Scooby Gang sets about figuring out how to break it. It gets into some of the history of the Arcana—some of which was wiped out and hidden—and dives into generational trauma and grief, as well as discovering things about themselves and their families that they didn’t want to know.
It’s interesting that the second book is quite a bit shorter than the first one. I don’t feel like I see that very often. While The Cursed Fate doesn’t feel too rushed, I did wish I’d gotten to spend a little more time in this world again, because I really love Prentice-Jones’ illustration style. It seems like the first book was just longer to reach a particular cliffhanger as a break, but overall the two books together tell a good story.
It does feel like this story is over, though it concludes with “The End… For Now” so that leaves the door open for more Arcana in the future.
The Escape Game by Marissa Meyer & Tamara Moss
Welcome to fifth season of The Escape Game, a reality TV series where teams of teenagers compete to solve escape rooms. Somehow the show is continuing, despite the fact that season four ended with a murder—Alicia Angelos, one of the competitors, was found in a prop coffin in the finale room. Everyone knows, of course, that the culprit was her sister (and fellow competitor) Sierra … who also happens to be back for season five. Nothing like some drama to drum up rating, right?
Sierra’s been placed on a team with Carter, a math whiz and well-known streamer who hides behind her cartoon avatar but is much less confident in real life; Adi, wordsmith extraordinaire who just wants to get away from his overbearing, Hollywood has-been mother; and Beck, a synesthete escape room connoisseur who is after more than just the prize money. You get some of the usual new team conflicts as the four get to know each other and muddle their way through the first couple events (and hope Sierra doesn’t murder them in their sleep), but it’s made clear pretty early that Sierra is not the killer, and what she’s really after in this season is justice for her sister.
She’s not alone—strange clues start turning up in the puzzles, too, things that hint at the murder and promise to reveal more. Somebody has information, but who is it? If Sierra and her team are going to solve the murder, they need to make it to the finale of the show.
I love escape rooms, so the theme of this one was a lot of fun, and there are plenty of puzzles that the kids get to solve over the course of the book. Some of them (particularly some of the word puzzles) are ones that you can try to figure out before the answer is revealed, but there are also plenty that are just described as the teams work through them as part of the story. The book also leans heavily into some Hollywood tropes: the cutthroat producer who’s willing to do whatever it takes to keep the show running, the charming young host who doesn’t understand any of the puzzles but puts on a good show, and the revered Game Master who may not be as awesome as everyone thinks he is.
Although the murder mystery is solved by the end of the book, there’s more in store: throughout the book we learn about Victor Cunningham, a treasure hunter who has turned his estate into a puzzle paradise. It turns out that a couple of the characters have connections to Victor, and it seems like in a future book we’ll get to see those connections start to play out.
Puzzleheart by Jenn Reese
This one’s a little less of a Scooby Gang—there are just two kids—but it ties into the last one because of the escape rooms and puzzles. Eklund’s Puzzle House was built as a bed-and-breakfast full of tricky puzzles, but it never opened because Herbert Eklund passed away before it was completed, at which point Savannah Eklund swore off puzzles and even sent her son Grayson away to live with his aunt. Many years later, the house is in disrepair and Savannah is getting ready to sell it; Grayson’s kid Perigee has finagled a visit to the house, hoping to patch things up between his dad and grandmother, but also to get a chance to see this house that their dad has been telling them about their whole lives.
I’d seen in the description of the book that the house was a character in Puzzleheart, but I assumed that was metaphorically, like the way people say New York City is practically a character in certain movies. Nope: the House appears to be sentient, and gets its own interlude chapters where we get to find out a little bit what it’s thinking. The House, against Savannah’s wishes, reveals its first puzzle to Perigee and challenges them to start solving. Perigee is joined by Lily, another kid who happens to be staying at the house (with a bunch of kittens) while her mom is doing search-and-rescue work in the surrounding mountains.
I’m only about halfway through the book so far, but I’m enjoying the mystery. What happened to Herbert Eklund, and why did Savannah give up on puzzles? What happened between her and Grayson, who grew up while his dad was building the house? The house itself has hidden panels and wondrous rooms, aside from being essentially alive, so I’m eager to see more of that as Perigee and Lily explore it.
Disclosure: I received review copies of these books. Affiliate links to Bookshop.org help support my writing and independent booksellers!
