Reviews for The Guggenheim mystery

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A clever junior detective must solve an art heist in this New York City-set sequel to the late Siobhan Dowd's London Eye Mystery (2008).Twelve-year-old Ted Spark, his 14-year-old sister, Kat, and their mother, Faith, fly to the U.S. to visit Ted and Kat's cousin Salim and eccentric aunt Gloria. Tourism soon segues into investigation when a painting at the Guggenheim, where Aunt Gloria works, goes missing and she becomes the prime suspect. Although overwhelmed by the strange city and uncertain about his friendship with Kat and Salim, Ted uses his encyclopedic knowledge, keen observation skills, and appreciation for patterns to try and prove Aunt Gloria's innocence. Perplexed by figures of speech, Ted nonetheless embraces metaphors, relating his adventures through meteorology and Homer's Odyssey. Although never explicitly identified as such, Ted presents as someone on the autism spectrumliteral, unfiltered, routine-orientedbut Dowd and Stevens (Murder Is Bad Manners, 2015, etc.) depict him as neither a savant nor a saintly sufferer. Rather, Ted Spark has a "funny brain, which works on a different operating system than other people's," much like his fictional predecessors Sherlock Holmes and Encyclopedia Brown. Ted notices racial differences, such as Salim's brown skin, but he seems to adhere to the white default with respect to himself and the rest of the family.Fast-paced, suspenseful, but never scary, a middle-grade mystery with a singular voice and a welcome continuation of the Sparks' adventures. (Mystery. 8-12) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.


Horn Book
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

The characters from deceased author Siobhan Dowd's The London Eye Mystery return to solve a painting theft from NYC's Guggenheim Museum. Twelve-year-old Ted teams up with his sister Kat and cousin Salim after Salim's curator mother is falsely accused. Ted's Asperger's--his need for routine, obsession with patterns, and difficulty interpreting facial expressions and idioms--infuses his narration and informs the mystery's progression. (c) Copyright 2019. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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