Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Case Closed vol. 1 by Gosho Aoyama

This series of Japanese manga mysteries was recommended to me by mystery writer Michael Dahl. The detective, Jimmy Kudo, is a brilliant high school student who is transformed into a little boy by a would-be killer. While trying to get his body back to normal, he takes on the name Conan Edagawa and becomes the "little brother" of his best friend and secret crush, Rachel Moore. Her father is an inept private investigator, and Conan solves cases for him while making him think he's solving them. There are quite a few mysteries within this one book, and while the clues are there, they are clever enough that I couldn't solve them. It sort of reminded me of a modern-day Encyclopedia Brown, but with more sophisticated mysteries for older kids. I think middle school readers who like a mystery will really like this series.

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