Book Scavenger – The Alcatraz Escape

Jennifer Chambliss Bertman's Book Scavenger - The Alcatraz Escape is a puzzle mystery for 9 year olds set on the most famous prison island in America.

What happens

Emily Crane and her best friend James play Book Scavenger, an online game where people hide books around a city and leave clues to find them. Its inventor, Garrison Griswold, has announced his biggest game yet. An escape room on Alcatraz, built with a famously reclusive crime writer called Errol Roy.

To get in, you solve an entry puzzle. Everyone is given a different one, and you get three attempts.

Emily has used two.

That is the part of this book that will land at home. She's the one with the reputation for being good at puzzles. All her friends assume she's already in. Who wants to be the one who says they're stuck?

So she doesn't say it. Her brother offers to help and she snaps at him. Then she sits down, spots the thing she misread, works it through properly and still gets it wrong.

Meanwhile Errol Roy stands at his window with his cat, thinking about the one book of his that nobody bought, and decides it's time to tell the last story he has in him.

The puzzles are real ones your reader can attempt. The entry puzzle is a picture equation made of spiders and clocks and hats, and the answer turns on the order of operations, which is a lovely trap to set for a child who rushes. (The answer is not fifteen.)

Alcatraz arrives with its history attached. Emily's friends argue about who was sent there and why, one of them says people died on the island, another insists it's haunted. It's handled lightly and there's nothing gruesome on the page, but if your reader tends to think about that sort of thing at bedtime, you'll want to know it's in there.

There have been earlier adventures for Emily and James, and this one refers back to them without stopping to explain. It won't slow your reader down.

What to read next

Codes and an old house next, then. The Explorer's Code is on the same shelf, and in it three children spend a weekend in a Virginia mansion that has been shut up for decades, with no phones allowed and a tower that nobody has offered to show them.