By David A. Adler
A girl with a photographic memory says 'Click!' to snap a mental picture, then uses it to catch a pair of jewel thieves at the mall.
Jennifer Jansen has a memory like a camera. She says 'Click!' out loud, blinks, and stores whatever she's looking at exactly as it was, which is how she got the nickname Cam. When two men rob the jewelry shop at the shopping mall, Cam is the only one who really saw them, and she and her friend Eric set off to follow the clues her mind photographed. It's a real caper scaled down for a brand-new reader: watch closely, remember better than the grown-ups, and catch the thieves.
This is a lovely next rung up from the very first mysteries. The chapters are short and the print is roomy, but the case has a bit more meat than a lost drawing, real thieves, a real chase, an actual clue-by-clue trail. Cam's memory gadget gives your child a way in: they can play along, trying to remember what she saw. And there are dozens of these, so a child who takes to the first one has a long, dependable series waiting.