Chicagoland Detective Agency 4: The Big Flush

(Paperback)

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Continual requests from librarians for mysteries., Cast reflects the diversity of the Chicago area.

Megan's back! After she's booted from Stepford Prep for insubordination, her father sends her to a prospective students event at elite Pine Lake Academy. With Raf and Bradley in tow, Megan inadvertently stumbles into an old, abandoned bathroom. While things are getting spooky in there, Raf sips from a fountain, and water is not the only thing he gets-a protoplasmic spirit takes over his body. Not just any ghost, but a teenage girl from the 1910s! Overcome, Raf gets a hankering to watch Charlie Chaplin at the picture house and dance the Turkey Trot. Things tum from strange to Chicagoland-size bizarre when a second ghost joins in. Raf, Megan, and Bradley mediate between two angry spirits, a seance is performed, and the history that has dogged Pine Lake Academy for a century is revealed: family rivalry, massive misunderstandings, and a whole band of ghosts from the Titanic!

Reviews

This mystery should come with sheet music and a dance chart.

A ghost is haunting the girls' bathroom at Pine Lake Academy, but that isn't the interesting part of the story. The interesting thing is that she's singing 'Alexander's Ragtime Band.' Anyone who drinks the water ends up possessed, and even a manly young detective like Raf Hernandez finds himself saying, 'How I love the Turkey Trot! But Auntie says the Turkey Trot and the Grizzly Bear are vulgar and will corrupt today's youth.' Some authors might stop at that level of quirkiness, but Robbins gets wilder and more inventive as the story goes o--even in a book with a talking dog in the first chapter. In Chapter 4, to solve the mystery, the dog allows himself to be possessed by not one, but two ghosts, who can't stop arguing. Haunted plumbing doesn't scare him. 'Us dogs always drink from toilet bowls, ' he says. Not every page contains a surprise. The conclusion is oddly mundane; it has to do with the disposition of a household object. But then, the mystery is beside the point. Who needs detective work when an entire ghostly orchestra shows up for the final chapter

Author Bio

Trina Robbins established herself during the underground com ix movement of the 1960s, and in the 1970s published the first all-woman comic book, It Ain't Me, Babe Comix, and the anthology Wimmen's Comix. She was a penciller on Wonder Woman in the 1980s, created the series Go Girl! with artist Anne Timmons for Image Comics, has written numerous nonfiction books for children and adults, and designed Vampirella's costume. She lives in San Franscico with her partner, comics artist Steve Leialoha.