Nick and Tesla’s Special Effects Spectacular

Bob Pflugfelder and Steve Hockensmith's Nick and Tesla's Special Effects Spectacular is a Hollywood mystery for 10 year olds with a real gadget to build in the middle of it.

What happens

Nick and Tesla are twins spending the summer with their Uncle Newt, an inventor whose projects keep blowing up the basement. Their parents flew off to research soybean irrigation in Uzbekistan and haven't been in touch since. Nick has gone a bit obsessive about it.

Tesla's cure for that is a project. Their friend Silas is filming a superhero movie in a back garden and his footage is so jumpy it made somebody's little sister throw up. So the twins build him a camera stabiliser out of plastic pipe and a great many pennies.

Then Silas's friend DeMarco produces an aunt who turns out to be a real film producer, shooting a real Metalman film in their small town. And the four of them are on the set.

It's proper behind-the-scenes stuff. Zombies eating doughnuts by the catering table. Runners talking into walkie-talkies about flushing guests. A leading man in blue and silver armour who wants his helmet off so the audience knows it's him.

Then, mid-take, the actor starts twitching and drops to the pavement, and nobody watching can tell whether that's in the script.

The science isn't decoration here. The stabiliser Nick and Tesla build is written out as instructions your reader can actually follow, with the pipe lengths and the sponge and the screwdriver all listed. (It really does take a lot of pennies. You may want to raid a jar.)

The mystery runs on ordinary noticing, too. Somebody keeps leaking the film's secrets, Tesla spots it, and Nick can tell from her voice that she's shifting into what he calls nose-poking mode.

This isn't the first book about the twins. Their missing parents are an ongoing thread and the story refers back to an earlier case, so your reader is walking in partway. It stands up fine on its own.

What to read next

If you've got a reader who takes things apart and then wants the instructions, The Drone Pursuit is in the library as well. Tom and Noah build a spying drone with tiny directional microphones, fly it down a school corridor, and end up convinced the caretaker is a wanted hacker.