Mystery Books for Young Detectives!
Title: Agent Lion
By: David Soman
Published: 2020
Fluffy the cat is missing and there's only one detective for the job! Agent Lion is certain he'll find Fluffy in no time. But Fluffy is not in Mr. Wombat's apartment, and Fluffy is not on the roof ... Will Agent Lion ever crack the case?
Ages: 4-8 years
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Title: What really happened to Humpty?
By: Jeanie Franz Ransom
Published: 2009
Detective Joe Dumpty rushes to investigate the mysterious circumstances under which his older brother, Humpty, fell from a wall on his first day as captain of the new Neighborhood Watch program.
Ages: 4-8 years
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Title: Pigeon P.I.
By: Meg McLaren
Published: 2017
A pigeon private eye captures a birdnapper with help from his feathered friends.
Ages: 4-8 years
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Title: Detective Mole
By: Camilla Pintonato
Published: 2021
Oscar is a whiz in the kitchen, but he's always dreamed of being a detective. When a squirrel is reported missing, Oscar hopes this will be his big break. Since he's read so many mysteries and has a nose for details, he knows exactly how to lead an investigation. But the clues pile up and he's nowhere closer to solving the case. Will he be able to track down the missing squirrel?
Ages: 4-8 years
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Title: Not an alphabet book : the case of the missing cake
By: Eoin McLaughlin
Published: 2020
There has been a terrible crime, Bear tells us. Someone has STOLEN a delicious chocolate cake! Bear sets off to find the culprit, questioning characters and compiling clues from A to Z.
Ages: 4-8 years
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Title: Detective Dinosaur
By: James Skofield
Published: 1996
Detective Dinosaur and Officer Pterodactyl are challenged to solve three cases when a hat is missing, a shoe squeaks, and a loud clanging comes from a dark alley at night.
Ages: 4-8 years
Title: Pigeon private detectives: The Case of Missing Tarts
By: Christee Bauer-Curran
Published: 2023
When someone slips into the precinct and steals Mama Pigeon's tarts, pigeon detectives Martin P. Sweets, Felix Danish, and Ralph Custard follow the clues to find out who stole the delicious treats.
Ages: 6-9 years
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Title: Zack and Zoe Mysteries: The missing baseball
By: Mike Lupica
Published: 2018
Eight-year-old twins Zach and Zoe follow clues to find Zach's missing baseball, signed by his favorite major league player, while competing in Spirit Week events at school.
Ages: 6-9 years
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Title: Milo & Jazz Mysteries: The case of the stinky socks
By: Lewis Montgomery
Published: 2009
Detectives-in-training Milo and Jazz join forces to tackle their first big case--finding out who stole the lucky socks from the high school baseball team's star pitcher.
Ages: 4-9 years
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Title: Inspector Flytrap: The president's mane is missing
By: Tom Anglerberger
Published: 2016
Hoping to become the world's greatest detective, Inspector Flytrap, a Venus Flytrap, assisted by his assistant, Nina the Goat, investigates a thrilling mystery at the Capitol Building at the request of President Horse G. Horse.
Ages: 6-9 years
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Title: Simon and Chester: Super detectives
By: Cale Atkinson
Published: 2021
Welcome to the world of Simon and Chester, ghost and boy duo extraordinaire. They like to kick butt and take names. They don't like chores. They are best friends. And they are about to solve the MYSTERY OF A LIFETIME. (Oh, and eat some snacks probably.)
Ages: 6-9 years
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Title: InvestiGators
By: John Patrick Green
Published: 2020
With their Very Exciting Spy Technology and their tried-and-true, toilet-based travel techniques, the InvestiGators are undercover and on the case! And on their first mission together, they have not one but two mysteries to solve! Can Mango and Brash uncover the clues, crack their cases, and corral the crooks--or will the criminals wriggle out of their grasp?
Ages: 7-10 years
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Title: Enola Holmes, the graphic novels. Book one
By: Serena Blasco
Published: 2022
Fourteen-year-old Enola Holmes wakes on her birthday to discover that her mother has disappeared from the family's country manor, leaving only a collection of flowers and a coded message book. With Sherlock and Mycroft determined to ship her off to a boarding school, Enola escapes, displaying a cleverness that impresses even the elder Holmes. But nothing prepares her for what lies ahead...
Ages: 8-12 years
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Title: Goldie Vance: The hotel whodunit
By: Lilliam Rivera
Published: 2020
In early 1960s Florida, sixteen-year-old Goldie, an aspiring detective at the Crossed Palms Resort Hotel, investigates when a diamond-encrusted swim cap goes missing during the filming of a movie at the resort.
Ages: 8-12 years
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Title: Belly Up
By: Stuart Gibbs
Published: 2010
Twelve-year-old Teddy investigates when a popular Texas zoo's star attraction--Henry the hippopotamus--is murdered.
Ages: 8-12
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Title: The Amelia Six : an Amelia Earhart mystery
By: Kristin Gray
Published: 2020
Eleven-year-old Millie and five other girls, snowed in at Amelia Earhart Birthplace Museum in Atchison, Kansas, are on a scavenger hunt when the lights go out and Amelia's aviator goggles go missing.
Ages: 8-12 years
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Title: The case of the cryptic crinoline : an Enola Holmes mystery
By: Nancy Springer
Published: 2009
In late nineteenth-century London, fourteen-year-old Enola Holmes, much younger sister of detective Sherlock Holmes, turns to Florence Nightingale for help when her investigation into the disappearance of a Crimean War widow grows cold.
Ages: 9-12 years
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Title: Hide and Geek
By: T.P Jagger
Published: 2022
Eleven-year-old Gina Sparks, aspiring journalist, and her fellow GEEKs, Edgar, Elena, and Kevin, live in Elmwood, New Hampshire, a small town in serious danger of vanishing completely--unless the four friends can find the Van Houten fortune, which was supposedly promised to the town by Maxine Van Houten, a famous toymaker who loved complicated puzzles.
Ages: 8-12 years
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Title: Judy Moody, girl detective
By: Megan McDonald
Published: 2010
When a puppy who is being trained as a police dog goes missing, third-grader Judy forms a detective agency to solve the mystery, imitating her literary heroine, Nancy Drew.
Ages: 6-9
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Title: Masterpiece
By: Elise Broach
Published: 2008
After Marvin, a beetle, makes a miniature drawing as an eleventh birthday gift for James, a human with whom he shares a house, the two new friends work together to help recover a Dürer drawing stolen from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Ages: 8-12 years
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Title: The London Eye mystery
By: Siobahn Dowd
Published: 2008
When Ted and Kat's cousin Salim disappears from the London Eye ferris wheel, the two siblings must work together--Ted with his brain that is "wired differently" and impatient Kat--to try to solve the mystery of what happened to Salim.
Ages: 8 -12 years
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Title: Chester Keene cracks the code
By: Kekla Magoon
Published: 2022
Eleven-year-old Chester and his classmate Skye, tasked with a complex puzzle-solving mission, discover the key to their spy assignment is to stop a heist, but cracking the code could mean finding out things are not always what they seem.
Ages: 8-12 years
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Title: The lost library
By: Rebecca Stead
Published: 2023
When a mysterious little free library (guarded by a large orange cat) appears overnight in the small town of Martinville, eleven-year-old Evan plucks two weathered books from its shelves, never suspecting that his life is about to change. Evan and his best friend Rafe quickly discover a link between one of the old books and a long-ago event that none of the grown-ups want to talk about. The two boys start asking questions whose answers will transform not only their own futures, but the town itself.
Ages: 8-12 years
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Title: Finally, something mysterious
By: Doug Cornett
Published: 2020
Paul Marconi and his two friends are amateur detectives and find their biggest case when their neighbor wakes up to lawn full of rubber duckies. The kids set out to discover the culprit.
Ages: 8-12 years
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Title: Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's library
By: Chris Grabenstein
Published: 2013
Twelve-year-old Kyle gets to stay overnight in the new town library, designed by his hero (the famous gamemaker Luigi Lemoncello), with other students but finds that come morning he must work with friends to solve puzzles in order to escape.
Ages: 8-12 years
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Title: The Westing Game
By: Ellen Raskin
Published: 1987
The mysterious death of an eccentric millionaire brings together an unlikely assortment of heirs who must uncover the circumstances of his death before they can claim their inheritance.
Ages: 9-12 years
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Title: The Swifts : a dictionary of scoundrels
By: Beth Lincoln
Published: 2023
On the day they are born, every Swift child is brought before the sacred Family Dictionary. They are given a name, and a definition. A definition it is assumed they will grow up to match. Meet Shenanigan Swift: Little sister. Risk-taker. Mischief-maker. Shenanigan is getting ready for the big Swift Family Reunion and plotting her next great scheme: hunting for Grand-Uncle Vile's long-lost treasure. She's excited to finally meet her arriving relatives--until one of them gives Arch-Aunt Schadenfreude a deadly shove down the stairs. So what if everyone thinks she'll never be more than a troublemaker, just because of her name? Shenanigan knows she can become whatever she wants, even a detective. And she's determined to follow the twisty clues and catch the killer.
Ages: 9-12 years
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Title: The Ambrose Deception
By: Emily Ecton
Published: 2018
Three Chicago students, Melissa, Wilf, and Bondi, are unlikely participants in a competition for a ten thousand-dollar scholarship, unaware that there is much more at stake.
Ages: 8-12 years
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Title: The Carrefour Curse
By: Dianne Salerni
Published: 2023
When twelve-year-old Garnet finally gets to meet her magical extended family she discovers they're all trapped in the ruins of their crumbling manor and Garnet must break a curse that has decimated three generations of Carrefours.
Ages: 8-12 years
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Title: Shakespeare's secret
By: Elise Broach
Published: 2005
Named after a character in a Shakespeare play, misfit sixth-grader Hero becomes interested in exploring this unusual connection because of a valuable diamond supposedly hidden in her new house, an intriguing neighbor, and the unexpected attention of the most popular boy in school.
Ages: 8-12 years
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Title: The Ghost in the Tokaido Inn
By: Dorothy Hoobler
Published: 2005
While attempting to solve the mystery of a stolen jewel, Seikei, a merchant's son who longs to be a samurai, joins a group of kabuki actors in eighteenth-century Japan.
Ages: 8-12 years
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Title: The chameleon wore chartreuse : from the tattered casebook of Chet Gecko, private eye
By: Bruce Hale
Published: 2000
When hired by a fellow fourth-grader to find her missing brother, Chet Gecko uncovers a plot involving a Gila monster's revenge upon the school football team.
Ages: 8-12 years
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Title: The Parker Inheritance
By: Varian Johnson
Published: 2018
Twelve-year-old Candice Miller is spending the summer in Lambert, South Carolina, in the old house that belonged to her grandmother, who died after being dismissed as city manager for having the city tennis courts dug up looking for buried treasure--but when she finds the letter that sent her grandmother on the treasure hunt, she finds herself caught up in the mystery and, with the help of her new friend and fellow book-worm, Brandon, she sets out to find the inheritance, exonerate her grandmother, and expose an injustice once committed against an African American family in Lambert.
Ages: 8 -12 years
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Title: The Harlem Charade
By: Natasha Anastasia Tarpley
Published: 2017
Seventh-graders Jin, Alexandra, and Elvin come from very different backgrounds and circumstances, but they all live in Harlem, and when Elvin's grandfather is attacked they band together to find out who is responsible--and the search leads them to an enigmatic artist whose missing masterpieces are worth a fortune, and into conflict with an ambitious politician who wants to turn Harlem into an historic amusement park.
Ages: 9-12
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Title: Fast Pitch
By: Nic Stone
Published: 2021
Shenice Lockwood dreams of leading the Fulton Firebirds to the U12 softball regional championship. But Shenice's focus gets shaken when her great-uncle Jack reveals that a career-ending-and family-name-ruining-crime may have been a setup. It's up to Shenice to discover the truth about her family's past-and fast-before secrets take the Firebirds out of the game forever.
Ages: 9-12
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Title: The Candymakers
By: Wendy Mass
Published: 2010
When four twelve-year-olds, including Logan, who has grown up never leaving his parents' Life Is Sweet candy factory, compete in the Confectionary Association's annual contest, they unexpectedly become friends and uncover secrets about themselves during the process.
Ages: 8-12 years
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Title: The Swallowtail mystery: Wreck at Ada's reef
By: Michael Beil
Published: 2022
Twelve-year-old Lark Heron-Finch inherits a house on Swallowtail Island in Lake Erie, where she untangles a decades-old mystery and saves the island from unscrupulous developers.
Ages: 8-12 years
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Title: Drew Leclair crushes the case
By: Kathryn Bury
Published: 2023
When a thief breaks into the P.E. lockers, leaving behind cryptic ransom notes, Drew Leclair, who is determined to stay out of trouble, investigates while dealing with her friends' obsession with the upcoming Wonderland dance.
Ages: 8-12 years
Title: Skeleton Man
By: Joseph Bruchac
Published: 2001
After her parents disappear and she is turned over to the care of a strange "great-uncle, " Molly must rely on her dreams about an old Mohawk story for her safety and maybe even for her life.
Ages: 9-12
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Title: Chirp
By: Kate Messner
Published: 2020
Moving to Vermont the summer after seventh grade, a young gymnast hides a secret as she makes new friends and investigates her grandmother's claim that someone is trying to destroy her cricket farm.
Ages: 8-12 years
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