I received an advance copy of Disappearing Pets by, Angie Lake. This is a cute book for middle schoolers. Mina is solving a mystery. She is a cute kid. The pictures are good.

This second book in this series does just what it should do, in regards to keeping up the form of the previous – large print size and vibrant font use for reluctant readers to get a sense of satisfaction and pride, good illustrative quality, and again a no-nonsense straight in-to the story without yacking about the situation, format or the prequel. Our narrator is a wannabe investigator, who helped work out why her school was doling out junk food at every lunchtime, but now has a host of missing – and blatantly stolen – pets to look into. Yes, things are generally ramping up in intensity, which again is how the series should progress – we're gaining more knowledge of side characters, we're seeing more of the same but firmly different, and we're finding more extreme sports we're told the heroine's stuffed panda likes reading about. Newcomers to this kind of book may well be surprised at how slight a plot you can get away with when writing a 'thriller' for the primary school audience, but this actually is more twisty and satisfying than some. I could have done without the comedic callback being about vomit, but on the whole this does add to my verdict upon reading the first book, that these will be a success with their target readers.