Swindle 7 – Unleashed

Gordon Korman's Unleashed is the seventh Swindle book, a neighbourhood mystery for 8 year olds that starts with a dog chasing a van.

What happens

Luthor is a hundred and fifty pounds of Doberman and he has decided the exterminator's truck must be caught. Savannah, who is his person and normally the best dog handler on Long Island, cannot talk him out of it. He has never chased anything on wheels in his life.

At the same time, the shortcut to school disappears. Mrs Martindale has retired to Florida, and the man who has moved into her house puts up a sign, then a fence, and stands in his garden with a sledgehammer while the children trudge the long way round.

And Griffin Bing gets goaded into a national inventing contest by the most annoying boy in his year, roughly four seconds after announcing he wasn't entering.

Griffin is famous for plans. His friends have learned to flinch at the word, and Ben's mother has instructed Ben to walk away the next time it comes up. That running joke is the engine of the whole series, and it's still funny in the seventh one.

The cast is why you stay. Ben has narcolepsy and keeps a ferret inside his shirt whose actual job is to nip him awake. Pitch has been kept off one boys-only team after another, football and now wrestling, and is not letting it go. Logan is rehearsing for a sticking-plaster advert as though it were Hamlet. Savannah tells off her enormous Doberman like a disappointed head teacher, and her pet capuchin monkey smuggles him biscuits while he's grounded.

Korman gives you a chapter from Luthor's side as well, which is the best bit in it. The dog has no idea why everyone is cross with him. He knows the sound of that engine, and he knows that nothing has ever mattered more.

One thing to expect. The new neighbour is genuinely intimidating. He crosses his lawn towards the children carrying a three-foot pipe wrench, and afterwards one of them says he threatened them with a deadly weapon while another says he was probably just fixing something and had it in his hand. That disagreement is rather the point, but a sensitive reader will side with the first one and stay there.

Starting at book seven is fine, by the way. Everyone is introduced as you go and this plot is entirely its own.

What to read next

If your reader wants more of this lot, Jingle drops the same crew into a Christmas fundraiser at a local mansion, with Ben conscripted as an elf and no clear plan for where the ferret goes.