Explorer Academy – The Double Helix

Trudi Trueit's The Double Helix is an Explorer Academy adventure for 8 year olds about a boy whose dad has gone missing just before his class's first dig.

What happens

Cruz Coronado is a trainee explorer on Orion, a ship that's also a school. His dad hasn't answered a call or a text in days. So at ten to six one morning Cruz hops into his jeans and races up deck after deck to catch the helicopter taking his aunt home to join the search.

She won't let him come. His late mum left a secret formula carved into a stone cipher, broken into pieces and hidden around the world, and only Cruz can open her clues. A company called Nebula wants every trace of it gone. (Hubbard the dog has followed him all the way up, which doesn't help.)

Then an email pops up in the middle of class. It says they have his father. More instructions will come at the Halloween party.

The gadgets are half the fun. Emmett's glasses change colour and shape with his feelings, so Cruz can read his roommate's mood at a glance. The class gets an upgraded scanner that finds DNA on a fossil and projects the animal as a hologram. Grumpy teammate Dugan skips a step and a sabre-toothed cat comes leaping across the classroom!

Sailor wants to toss Dugan overboard after that (she'd throw a sandwich in after him, she's not heartless). And the fossil he was holding? Fossilised cat poop, which she's very keen to tell him.

It's worth knowing this one has a real edge. At the party Cruz plays a blindfold game and hears his dad's voice on a phone for a few seconds. Then a gloved hand closes round his throat and a voice demands the cipher. He fights his way out with a spray gadget, but it's tense, and the villains talk plainly about wanting him gone.

A child who worries about a parent going missing may find that hard. If your reader loves a proper cliffhanger with plenty of gadgets, they'll be hooked.

This is the third Explorer Academy book and it runs straight on from the first two, so a reader new to Cruz should start with The Nebula Secret.

What to read next

If it's the gadgets they love, The Drone Pursuit is set at another school where the inventions steal the show. Tom and his best friend fly a home-made spy drone down the corridors, dodge the hall monitor's drone and hide theirs by sticking it into a ceiling tile.