The Sherlock Files #1: The 100-Year-Old Secret by Tracy Barrett

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The Sherlock Files #1: The 100-Year-Old Secret
by Tracy Barrett
(Audio)

This was an extremely light mystery about two little kids, who are the descendants of the great Sherlock Holmes. They, like Holmes, are good at observation and logic. So when they are given Sherlock's old case book, they set to work trying to solve one of his old, unsolved cases: the mystery of the disappearance of a painting called "Girl in a Purple Hat."

The brother and sister pair, newly settled in London, are a fun little team. They each have their own strengths, but they both like the challenge of a good mystery.

Even though I could figure out all of the twists/clues in advance of these two youngsters (I assume the book is written so that kids solve it along with these little detectives), it still held my interest all right. It was a fun, complex mystery and neat to see these kids accomplishing something that hundreds of adults and even Sherlock Holmes didn't manage to do.

I also really liked that pretty much everything they do to solve the crime is legal and something a kid COULD physically do. They make phone calls or research in a library to find information. They learn how public transportation works so they can get to various locations to check out clues. They make deductions based on facts at hand and things they, normal kids probably would have experienced. Too many little kid mysteries give kids exceptional wisdom or let them bend the rules to get the mystery solved. And even though one of kids does have a a photographic memory, that's only used a few times for things that might have been remembered otherwise, so I overlooked that.

In all, it was a nice, light read. Not a challenge for an adult, but fun indeed :-)