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Tommy Greenwald's Dog Day Afterschool is a funny CrimeBiters mystery for 8 year olds, starring a boy who's sure his dog is a crime-fighting vampire.
We meet Jimmy training Abby in the back garden with a giant stuffed panda smeared in peanut butter. She rips it to shreds. Jimmy counts this as a success.
This is a later book in the CrimeBiters series, and the whole gang is here. There's Jimmy and Abby, super-organised Daisy, fidgety Irwin and Baxter, who would honestly rather be napping. They meet every Saturday in an old boathouse.
This time trouble comes from three directions. Daisy turns up with a new kitten called Purrkins and wants her in the gang. Abby is NOT impressed. Then someone steals the answer sheet from their maths teacher's desk, and the gang can't help wondering about Baxter, who's failing maths and fled a pop quiz sweating buckets. And the animal shelter where Jimmy helps out, the place Abby came from, is being sold.
The real puzzle here is about friends. Can you still trust someone when everything looks bad? Jimmy gets things wrong sometimes (he shouts at Abby and feels awful straight away), which makes him easy to like.
He tells it all himself, and it's packed with his FACTS, like the one about dogs never holding grudges. There are little PROFILE entries too, such as the one for Purrkins, whose age isn't important because she has nine lives. It's a bit like reading a detective's notebook.
It's really good on the everyday stuff. His big sister wants to drive across America with her boyfriend. His dad is making asparagus omelettes. His parents worry he's doing too much. It all feels very real next to the vampire-dog silliness.
If you've got a reader who loves dogs, jokes and a gentle mystery, this is spot on. It stands on its own too, because Jimmy fills you in on everyone.
To see how Jimmy and Abby first met, head back to My Dog is Better than Your Dog, where a blotch on Jimmy's face finally gets him the dog he's been begging for.
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