Adventures of Jack: The Agent With a Bone to Pick

D.R. Tara's Adventures of Jack The Agent With a Bone to Pick is three short stories for 6 year olds about a Jack Russell puppy who lands a job with a spy agency.

What happens

Jack is fifteen months old. He lives in Aberdeen with his Mummy and Daddy, who found him on the road and took him in. He rides on Mummy's mobility scooter and plays cricket with Daddy. He talks, and he has opinions.

Mostly about biscuits.

In the first story Mummy goes off shopping and asks him to guard the house. Jack is not keen. "Am I servant?" Ten minutes on his own is about all he can manage, so he bolts the front door behind him and follows her to the shops.

Then he hides behind pillars and writes down everything she does. The list is the best bit. Bought chips. Drank water. Dropped water, apologised to wet lady.

He's still taking notes when a man makes a grab for Mummy's purse. Jack, who is very small, latches onto the man's trousers and will not let go. The whole thing is over in two sentences and nobody gets hurt. A cat in a police uniform sees it happen and offers him a job on the force.

The other two stories follow from that. A run of robberies in Aberdeen has Jack chasing torn scraps of paper down to the seafront. In the last one he isn't detecting at all, he's just lonely, because Mummy has started a new job and Daddy keeps coming home too tired to play.

The fun of it is how grandly Jack carries himself. He's a very small dog with a very large sense of his own importance. "I might be small, but so is a bullet!" He sniffs a biscuit before he'll eat it, because only the best will do for a fine fellow like him.

Two honest things.

The English is wobbly in patches. Some lines are stiff in a way that doesn't quite land, and one or two read like they've come through a translation. If your reader is at the stage of noticing how sentences are put together, they may trip on a few.

And it really is short. Three stories, a handful of pages each, and it's done. That's rather nice for a reader who wants to finish a whole book in one go, and probably frustrating if they want something to disappear into.

What to read next

For another very small animal running very serious investigations, Basil and the Royal Dare has a mouse in a deerstalker cap who lives in Sherlock Holmes's cellar and gets called out to the royal household.