Playing With Fire

September 1, 2015

Gr 10 Up-Natural sleuth Claire Abbott returns in Playing with Fire. With her "radar for crime," she thinks she knows the identity of the town arsonist but encounters doubt and danger at every turn. In I.O.U. Dead, Keno Kalder runs into trouble while working as a slumlord's rent collector. What started as blackmail escalates quickly when someone is murdered. Peter Strand intends to stay out of the murder that got him hired at The Blue Dragon apartment building. When he finds out one of the tenants is the killer, however, Peter unlocks the Blue Dragon's secrets, and some of his own. This gritty Orca series provides entertaining, accessible mysteries for teens 16 and up who are reading at elementary levels.

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August 15, 2015
A journalist hovers between two suitors while tracking down an arsonist. Claire Abbott, a reporter and photographer for a small-town weekly newspaper, returns exhausted to her office after spending most of the night covering a story that involves a vision she had. It's a first for Claire but not for her mother, who's always been considered a little nutty because of her visions. When Claire saves a girl from a kidnapper, handsome volunteer firefighter Trevor Bragg is annoyed not just because her absence has ruined their planned date, but because she's spent hours talking to Matt Holden, the search-and-rescue manager for the area. The town has been suffering through a series of minor cases of arson. Now the firebug seems to be progressing to more dangerous blazes. Claire's vision of the latest one involves a young man, a young woman, and a gas can. The pair turn out to be none other than Trevor's younger brother and his girlfriend, both of whom deny setting any fires. So Claire resolves to take enough time away from her two jealous suitors to prove her visions really do lead to the truth. Part of the Rapid Read series, this short and easily solved mystery leaves little room for Anderson-Dargatz (Search and Rescue, 2014, etc.) to develop characters, clues, or anything else.

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