THE CURIOUS LEAGUE OF DETECTIVES AND THIEVES

A giant flying passenger liner bound for Brazil provides plenty of opportunities for apprentice sleuth John Boarhog, ward of legendary detective Toadius McGee, to show his talents.

In a second romp characterized by the frame narrator as true (“I have once again changed only the facts I didn’t like”) if deliciously over-the-top, the 12-year-old gumshoe-in-training finds himself struggling not only to counter the latest scheme of renowned thief Polly “Pickles” Cronopolis, but to prove himself both to a delegation from the Society of Sleuths and to his infuriatingly secretive guardian, Toadius. Both tasks are complicated by the presence aboard the palatial and, as swashbuckling Capt. Amelia Cloudhopper ominously puts it, “uncrashable,” H.M.R.A.S. Boutielle of renowned criminal mastermind Shim-Sham, a monkey recently escaped from imprisonment in New York’s maximum security Central Park Zoo. Not to mention, following a string of riotous melees and misadventures, an attack by sky pirates capped by a collision with an iceberg. Along with adding a racially diverse assortment of new adult characters to the array of magicians and circus performers introduced in the opener, Phillips gives his brown-skinned protagonist several new young friends and allies, including fabulously wealthy White-presenting Aussie fanboy Wembley Quokkas (and his loving mums) and Kana Rai, a circus performer of Japanese descent. Stay tuned for further feats of deduction and encounters with more fiendishly clever crooks.

Soaring, silly, and stocked with detectives and criminal masterminds…some of whom turn out to be both.