My son Tommy and I just finished reading Crimebiters 2 together and it was pretty cute. I was always partial to Nancy Drew, The Charisma series (girl spies! who are models! and can do cool stuff!) and (The New) Encyclopedia Brown books (now very old because I am very old) when I was a kid because I have always liked a good mystery. My son seems to enjoy a good mystery too because he brought this book home from his book fair along with his usual animal book staples (I honestly don’t know if we needed another book about whales…but we got it!)
Anyways, we didn’t read Crimebiters #1 and it turns out that it doesn’t matter. We follow a boy named Jimmy, his dog Abby (whom he believes to be a vampire dog with strange abilities–like being able to sniff out bad guys!), and Jimmy’s small group of friends called the Crime Biters. Having had some success in the crime solving business (in book 1), the gang is having trouble in book 2 with a) trying to find a crime to solve and b) keeping the group together. You see, Jimmy and his best friend both like Daisy (in the group) and accidentally, Jimmy declares that he’s going to play lacrosse…Jimmy isn’t much of a jock so everyone’s pretty shocked. Everyone’s even more shocked when he turns out to be a great goalie. Jimmy’s time commitment to the team and other things cause the Crime Biters to disband for most of the book. However, Jimmy does realize that there is a mystery to solve (but he and Abby kind of solve it without the help of the Crime Biters which I was like, “Huh?”). The Crime Biters get back together and my boy said that he would like to purchase Crime Biters 3–in the meantime, we’re reading Pax.
Crime Biters was pretty fun. Jimmy and his family are really sarcastic, just like ours so Tommy and I laughed pretty hard at some things that were probably not that funny but totally hit home for us. The mystery was kind of mediocre but the characters keep it fun.