By Jennifer Chambliss Bertman
A girl obsessed with a book-hunting game gets hold of a coded rare book that thieves attacked its owner to get.
Emily's family moves constantly, so her one steady thing is Book Scavenger, an online game where players hide books around a city and post ciphered clues to find them. When she moves to San Francisco, the game's famous creator, Garrison Griswold, is about to launch something new, until he's attacked at a train station and left in the hospital. The rare, code-filled book he was carrying ends up in Emily's hands. She and her neighbor James start cracking the ciphers hidden inside it, not realizing the men who attacked Griswold are hunting for the very same book, and for them.
Your child wants their puzzles with a real thriller wrapped around them. The code-cracking is satisfying, and it's braided into a chase with actual bad guys, which gives the book a pull the gentler puzzle stories don't have. It's a notch more suspenseful than a cozy mystery, so it suits a reader ready for a little edge with their brainwork, with a series to follow.