busy
THE SPAGHETTI DETECTIVES by Andreas Steinhofel (Chicken House 2011) opens with Rico finding a piece of cooked spaghetti on the sidewalk. He rushes back to the house to see which resident might be responsible for tossing spaghetti out the window. You see, Rico is different. He is a child proddity: a kid who thinks in a different way. He thinks his brain works kind of like the bingo machine with lots of things popping around in his brain all the time. It makes him dizzy, and sometimes it makes it easy for him to forget important things. Rico and his mother live on one of the floors of this house along with an unusual collection of tenants. Some love Rico and invite him into their homes. Others call him names. However, when Rico gets caught up in a real like mystery, he must focus on the facts at hand to perhaps save the life of a new friend, one who wears a blue helmet and a red airplane pinned to his shirt. <306>
Set in Germany (this is the first English translation of the author's works), the story sometimes buzzes and flips just like Rico's thinking. Think THERE'S A BOY IN THE GIRL'S BATHROOM combined with HARDY BOYS.