Connect the Scotts (The Dead Kid Detective Agency)
- context: Array
- icon:
- icon_position: before
- theme_hook_original: google_books_biblio
Connect the Scotts (The Dead Kid Detective Agency)
So what exactly was October hoping to find hidden in the labyrinthine storage system of Sticksville's only public museum? As longtime readers of the escapades of “The Dead Kid Detective Agency” series well know, ever since the black-clad dark makeup enthusiast October Schwartz accidentally raised from the dead the five kids with whom she was currrently committing a felony, she has been bound to the corpsified tweens -- first through their aid in solving the mysterious death of her kindly French teacher, Mr. O'Shea, and then through her offer to help each of the kids discover how and why they died in the historical eras in which they first took dirt naps. As it happens, the dead kids were rather good at detective work (read: "illegal building entry"), being able to walk through walls and get around largely undetected. But they required the shrewd mind (and warm body) that only -- let's presume -- October Swartz could provide to actually solve the riddles of their own demises. In the past six months, October and her six ghost friends had solved the mysteries behind the untimely deaths of United Empiire Loyalist Cyril Cooper (in 1783) and Scottish immigrant Morna MacIsaac (in 1914) and in both cases something way more sinister than a case of tuberculosis was to blame.
Of the two dead kids’ deaths that October and the team had already solved, 100% of them could be tied back to a seemingly ancient secret society in Sticksville named Asphodel Meadows -- a society that may also have ties to a long-dead Sticksville resident Fairfax Crisparkle, who may or may not have been a witch.
The excerpt above is taken from first chapter of Follow the Scotts, one written in the somewhat tongue-in-cheek voice of a 'narrator'; the following and alternate chapters are first-person narratives by October herself. The chapeters’ typefaces are different, but that is an unnecessary frill -- their styles of expression are even more different.
October is a 13-year-old Goth-in-training who has been raising these five kids from their graves every full moon or so for several months. They can only hang around for a month each time (there are strict rules about resurrection apparently), and so October’s time limits are tightly restricted when it comes to solving how they happened to meet their end. They don't know, and they can't rest properly until they do. October, in return for their help in solving present-day mysteries (her specialty), has promised to find out, and so far she has been successful in two cases. Now she has a third, that of Tabetha Scott, a slave from the United States who escaped on the Underground Railway with her father in the 1850s and ended up at its terminus in Sticksville. They weren't the only slaves to come there, but most escapees moved on to more hospitable places. Tabetha and Lunsford stayed, in spite of the town's being anything but welcoming. It wasn't slavery, but, as freedom went, it wasn't great. Tabetha worked as a maid for the mayor. Had she inadvertently seen something that made him feel she had to be killed, or was her death also a part of the Asphodel Meadows conspiracy? Or both? As well, the band competition at October’s high school has been complicated by someone's stealing the ticket money in such a manner that it was 'obviously' done by the band that the front-runner group considered to be its only real competition. Since October rather likes the accused band and heartily dislikes the one that she thinks organized the theft, she feels she has to respond to a plea for help and, therefore, has a lot on her plate this month!
Connect the Scotts has a lot of good points: the dead kids are funny and, of course, very different from one another, having been born over three centuries; and the historical facts are engagingly presented as Tabetha's story and, as a result, are not at all preachy. But ... October, herself, is less convincing in this book than in earlier ones, and the book, at over 300 pages, is a bit lengthy for its content. One wishes October (and particularly the other narrator) would just get on with it, irrational though that might be in the circumstances. October's nemesis, Ashlie, is also overdrawn, a caricature of the glamour queen of the school. No teacher/principal/parent would let a kid get away with what Ashlie manages with apparent ease (though I am perhaps being naive). The bullying that goes on, particularly in the cafeteria is overdone as well, though I did like the image of Mr. Santuzzi getting the attention of the near-rioting students by doing a strong-man act of picking up a lunch table complete with benches and holding it over his head before slamming it down onto the floor. Crude but effective!
Obviously, there are going to have to be more books in this series -- there are more dead kids with mysterious deaths to be solved, not to mention the disappearance of October's mother which keeps being mentioned tantalizingly, without much explanation or further developments. I look forward with interest to reading them but hope that Munday can rein in his narrator's irony and wordiness.
Mary Thomas lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba, (mostly), Bracebridge, Ontario, (summers), and Oxford, United Kingdom, (our winter, its spring) and enjoys all three places; they all have good libraries!