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Anthony McGowan's Leopard Adventure is a wild animal rescue story for 10 year olds about a girl who swaps a lonely boarding school summer for a mission to save a leopard.
It's the first of the Willard Price Adventures, so this is where your reader meets everybody.
Amazon Hunt is the only girl left at her boarding school for the holidays. Her mum and dad are off on an expedition (again). One more slip and the headmistress will keep her shut inside all summer.
So when she's out late watching badgers, she climbs the drainpipe to her third-floor window. She's secretly scared of heights. She slips. Somebody catches her by the wrist.
It's her cousin Frazer, who she's never met. He's come to take her to America, where his dad runs TRACKS, a team that drops everything to help wild animals in danger.
Her parents are meant to be waiting there. They aren't.
The TRACKS farm is brilliant. There are zebras in the field, baby Komodo dragons in the barn and a grumpy cassowary called Lady Gaga. Is there anything here that doesn't want to bite Amazon? (Yes. A very kind horse called Joey.)
Then a job comes in. A forest fire in the far east of Russia has cut off an Amur leopard, the rarest big cat in the world, and she may have cubs. The cousins are on the team.
It's fast and it's funnier than you'd expect. Frazer tries to save Amazon from a furious giant forest hog with his new tranquilliser gun and shoots her in the bottom instead. She gets her own back.
The two of them tease each other constantly and you can tell they're becoming friends. Amazon is prickly with people and soft with every animal she meets. Frazer thinks everything is cool (including the animals that would like to eat him).
It's worth knowing that the animals here are properly dangerous. The opening tells you what a hog's tusks could do to a person's stomach. A short scene from the mother leopard's side adds people with guns and dogs in the woods, and a trap.
Amazon's missing parents hang over everything too, and she falls asleep holding her mum's old neckerchief. If your reader worries about mums and dads not coming home, that might be the hard part. If they love wildlife and like their danger to feel real, they'll race through it.
Shark Adventure comes next. The cousins are sent to a coral island in the Pacific, where baby leatherback turtles need help getting from their nests to the sea.
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