Lindy wants to attend band camp with her best friend Margaret. The problem is her parents have had a run of bad luck. House repairs, her brother needs glasses, and other financial problems. Lindy’s luck may have changed. She is at their annual Bloomsberry Cucumber Festival with Margaret and they are looking for food. She gets caught in front of a dish made Granny Goose. It looks and smells foul. Granny puts an extra-large helping on her plate. Her mother insists she eat it. When she goes to take her first bite she finds something shiny. It is a gold locket. She learns that there has been a robbery in the neighborhood and Granny Goose is the prime suspect. She and her two friends set out to catch the culprit so that they can get the reward money. There were a lot of twists and turns in this. I honestly didn’t suspect the culprit until they revealed the thief. This was a very easy read and one I think will keep my students engaged. ( )

An unsupervised goose, missing family heirlooms, and some suspicious characters turn the annual cucumber festival into a robbery investigation for three sixth-grade friends. ( )

First she (Lindy Phillips) finds out that she wont be able to attend Summer Band Camp with her friend (Margaret). Next her mother expects her to eat Mrs. Unger’s (Granny Goose) green slime she calls ‘stewed cucumbers’. After finally convincing her stomach to take a bite, she finds a gold and ruby heart locket. Lindy, Margaret and the saxophone player Gus Kinnard are sure Granny Goose did not steal the locket, they knew about the Heirloom robberies and the reward, that would be enough to get Lindy to Band camp, all they had to do was figure out who really stole all the loot, and who was trying to set up Granny Goose.

***3 - Quick, easy, a fun who-dun-it crime to solve, Kid style. These pre-teens take on the job of trying to figure out a grown-up problem (every pre-teens dream), who stole the jewelry and why were the pieces that they found, where they found them. This is actually a fairly realistic possibility, the characters are all developed enough to get me attached to them and the differences in each of them is well thought out and believable, like most smart-alac pre-teens that know more now than they will at age 30. Written from Lindy’s point of view, this is fun (but not laugh out loud funny), it has suspense (not really edge of your seat), it has a bully (the Cucumber Princess) and it even has a goose named Pickle.

This is an Advance Reader Copy from Harper Collins Children, due to be published in May 2009 ( )