Spies and Prejudice

May 13, 2013
Sixteen-year-old Berry Fields has been on stakeouts with her private investigator father since she was nine, and handling cases since she was 14. The one case she can’t crack is the car crash that killed her mother. When Berry happens upon information that suggests the crash may be linked to her best friend’s father, she starts to investigate, aided—or is it obstructed?—by a couple of handsome guys who’ve recently turned up in school. One seems nice, the other haughty, but both turn out to have ties to the case. Vance (Silver) sets the stakes high: Berry isn’t the only budding spy at work, and nearly every major character’s father comes under suspicion. But while she’s good when it comes to romance—it’s fun to watch Berry and Tanner move from dislike to attraction, à la Elizabeth and Darcy in the novel’s quasi-namesake—the plot feels manufactured and improbable. The big reveal, meanwhile, gives short shrift to Berry’s connection to her lost mother, which until then had been the driving force behind the story. Ages 12–up. Agent: Sarah Davies, Greenhouse Literary Agency.

June 1, 2013

Gr 7-10-A fun, contemporary mystery thriller with some romance thrown in to spice it up. Strawberry Fields, the daughter of a private investigator, has been working with her father since her mother died years earlier. Her best friend, Mary Chris, is a whiz at technology. The story opens with the two girls on a stakeout at a restaurant where they meet Tanner and Ryan, who are new in town and are going to be attending their high school. When Berry leaves the restaurant, she spies her friend's father handing over files with her mother's name on them to a woman in the parking lot, and she is determined to solve the mystery of her mother's death. Was it suicide, like the police said? An accident? Or murder? In the end, she has to decide who to trust as no one seems to want her to find out the truth about the car accident that took her mom. The premise of this story may seem implausible: teenagers handling top-secret information, using high-tech surveillance equipment, and spying on corporations, but it works here. Vance has written a humorous, fast-paced story in which the teens seem to know more than the adults. Recommend it to those who want a quick read about smart high-school characters who spend more time solving mysteries than algebraic equations.-Elizabeth Kahn, Patrick F. Taylor Science & Technology Academy, Jefferson, LA

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