Read Hardy Boys Clue Book 11 – Bug-Napped free for 7 days. £7.99/month after - less than a paperback.
Franklin W Dixon's Bug-Napped is a Hardy Boys Clue Book mystery for 7 year olds about a borrowed beetle that disappears overnight.
Frank is nine and Joe is eight. They love solving mysteries and they carry their clue book everywhere (Joe even takes it to bed in his pyjama pocket).
At an Earth Day festival in the park, Joe loses a belly-bump contest to Aki, a boy whose family has moved from Japan. Aki's secret is Izumi, a stag beetle that looks like it's wearing a samurai helmet. Stag beetles are supposed to be lucky. And Aki lets the brothers take Izumi home for the weekend!
The trouble is that Izumi hisses and chirps all night long. So Joe pops the tank out on the front step so he can finally sleep. In the morning the tank has gone.
Aki is coming to collect his beetle on Sunday afternoon, which gives the boys a day and a half. Out comes the clue book and the five questions every good detective asks.
The suspects are great fun. There's Carl the Critter Curator, who wears purple antennas and was overheard wanting a huge beetle for his insect museum. There's Phil, their inventor friend, who says he'd do anything to win a place at an inventors' camp and was very interested in a lucky bug. And there's Leif, whose Venus flytrap Jaws could do with bigger bugs to eat. Gulp!
Joe even ends up with his finger stuck in the flytrap (he was checking for traces of beetle).
It's a really easy, cheerful read. There's lots of back-and-forth between the brothers, silly jokes about kale on pizza, and every clue gets talked through out loud so younger readers can keep up. Frank is the careful one who reminds Joe not to accuse anyone without proof. Joe is the one who jumps to conclusions.
It's a nice pick for a child who likes to feel they're solving it too. Will they work out who took Izumi before Frank and Joe do?
If your reader likes creepy-crawlies in their mysteries, try Buggy Breakout. It's Bug Week in Nancy Drew's third-grade class, and the school Bug Club is about to bring its pet insects in for show-and-tell.
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