THE TOOM COUNTY MUD RACE

High-schooler Jackie Crockett, his aptly nicknamed sidekick Juan ``Snake'' Gomez, and Bonnie Galloway, his steady-cum- mechanic are determined to win the mud race even though it means driving through country so swampy that even fancy four-wheel- drive vehicles have been known to sink without a trace. To complicate matters, the trio has fallen afoul of sinister migrant labor supervisor X Slocum and his locally prominent boss, L. T. Hackett—it seems that Hackett has lost one of the mysteriously important packages in which he's been surreptitiously trafficking, and Snake has found it. At the outset, Jackie warns readers that ``this book has a lot in it about pickup trucks, and mud''; it also features a certain amount of gratuitously crude comedy, a contrived plot, hilariously ineffectual bad guys, and expertly done cliffhangers at the end of nearly every chapter. A patchy but nonstop first novel. (Fiction. 13-16)