Mysterious Reviews, mysteries reviewed by the Hidden Staircase Mystery Books, is publishing a new review of The Adventures of Jack Lime by James Leck. For our blog readers, we are printing it first here in advance of its publication on our website.
The Adventures of Jack Lime by James Leck
A Jack Lime Mystery
Kids Can Press (Hardcover)
ISBN-10: 1-55453-365-1 (1554533651)
ISBN-13: 978-1-55453-365-7 (9781554533657)
Publication Date: February 2010
List Price: $16.95
Review: High school student and private investigator Jack Lime investigates three cases of teenage crime in James Leck's The Adventures of Jack Lime.
This line of work isn't all glitz and glamour, that's for sure. Ninety-nine percent of the time, it's dreary, dirty and dull. It's about rooting around in dumpsters and eating a stale granola bar you found in your pocket for breakfast instead of your grandma's buttermilk pancakes because you're waiting for the morning paper to show up, and the kicker is, you're not going to get to read it.
Jack Lime -- detective, private eye, gumshoe, last resort -- solves problems for people. In "The Case of the Broken Lock", he looks into the mysterious circumstances surrounding a missing bike; in "The Case of the Daily Telegraph", he's nearly stumped by a nefarious blackmail scheme; and in "The Case of the Big Dupe", he relates one of his first big cases after arriving at Iona High, exposing a gambling ring.
Each of these entertaining cases is crafted in the style of hard-boiled crime fiction, with lots of descriptive statements ("I woke up in a fog as thick as a three-day-old cup of joe"), plenty of thugs ("Bucky smiled, started to turn away, then spun around and slammed his fist into my gut like a runaway locomotive"), and beautiful girls to trip him up ("I thought I could get hooked on a girl like her if I wasn't careful, and I wasn't planning on being careful"). The mystery plots are well developed, and, though featuring older high school students and some PG-13 elements, are written at a slightly younger, middle school level.
The one aspect that doesn't work is portraying Jack as a narcoleptic. Not only is it unnecessary -- it doesn't add anything substantive to his character, and it doesn't play into any of the plots in a meaningful way -- it comes across as more intrusive than anything else. Possibly intended as a way to portray Jack as flawed, though, in this case, a character flaw would be certainly preferable to a physical one, but more probably as a way to make Jack more sympathetic ... but to whom -- other characters or the reader? -- isn't clear. Still, this minor objection aside, Jack Lime is a likeable PI and his cases credible and interesting; a sequel to The Adventures of Jack Lime would be most welcome.
Special thanks to Raab Associates for providing an ARC of The Adventures of Jack Lime for this review.
Review Copyright © 2010 — Hidden Staircase Mystery Books — All Rights Reserved
If you are interested in purchasing The Adventures of Jack Lime from Amazon.com, please click the button to the right.
Synopsis (from the publisher): Meet Jack Lime, private investigator, who solves problems for his fellow Iona High students. Sometimes he falls for the dames who hire him, sometimes he falls in the river and sometimes he falls asleep (he’s narcoleptic). But rest assured that whether he’s tracking down a missing banana-seat bike or a kidnapped hamster, or cracking open a trivia tournament betting ring, Lime will follow every lead.
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