Nick and Tesla’s Solar-Powered Showdown

Bob Pflugfelder & Steve Hockensmith's Nick and Tesla's Solar-Powered Showdown is a gadget-packed mystery for 10 year olds about two eleven-year-old twins who are sick of waiting for news.

What happens

Nick and Tesla have spent the whole summer at Uncle Newt's house in Half Moon Bay. Their parents were supposed to be studying soybeans in Uzbekistan. They weren't. They're on the run from people who want their work, and now even the government agents don't seem to know where they are.

This time it's Nick, usually the careful twin, who wants to take the risks. He clicks on a pop-up that promises to help save his parents. (It's an advert for car insurance.)

So he comes up with a better plan. Or at least a much stranger one. It involves a warm ham, a meat thermometer, two forks and the gold pendants an agent once told them to wear close to their hearts. Who else would try to get a secret agent's attention by giving a ham a bath in the Pacific?

It's properly funny. Uncle Newt is a joy. His basement explodes on a regular basis, and when he hears the twins' parents are missing, his first move is to announce lunch. His big secret project turns out to be a solar-powered hot dog cooker made from a crisp tube.

The science is real, too. The twins chat about surface area and body temperature while they cool the ham in the surf. And the book includes step-by-step instructions for building Uncle Newt's hot dog heater yourself, with a grown-up in charge of the drill and the glue gun. Tinkerers will probably want to try it (you might need to hide the crisp tubes).

One thing to know is that this story leans on what's happened before. Little footnotes from the authors keep pointing back to things that happened at the end of Secret Agent Gadget Battle, and one of them even opens with "spoiler alert". The twins explain enough that it still makes sense on its own.

The stakes are real, with missing parents and grown-ups talking about spies and kidnapping. But it's played for adventure and laughs rather than fear.

What to read next

If your reader would rather not have the previous book's ending given away, start with Nick and Tesla's Secret Agent Gadget Battle, the one those footnotes keep mentioning. It opens with Nick convinced that the woman gardening next door is a spy.