By Mac Barnett
A grown-up swears that as a boy in the 1980s the Queen of England phoned him up to steal back her missing Crown Jewels, and he tells it all completely straight.
Mac is an ordinary boy in a small California town until the telephone rings and it's the actual Queen of England, who needs a spy and has picked him. Off he flies to the Tower of London, then Paris and Moscow, chasing a stolen royal spoon past a KGB officer and a French president. The gag is that the whole 'true story' is being told by a deadpan adult who insists every ridiculous word of it happened.
This is the step past pure comics for a Bad Guys fan who's ready for a bit more text but still wants a page that's half pictures and all jokes. The caper races along, borders and disguises and a real heist to solve, so a reader who thinks chapter books are boring gets a spy movie instead. The deadpan 'this is all true' voice is the whole charm, and there's a stack of sequels once your child is in.