By Elizabeth Singer Hunt
A nine-year-old secret agent straps on his gadget watch and has a few hours to catch the thief whose stolen formula woke a museum T. rex.
Jack Stalwart is nine, and a real agent for the Global Protection Force, standing in for his older brother Max, who vanished on a mission. A scientist's dinosaur formula gets stolen, and a Tyrannosaurus rex comes thundering to life inside a New York museum. Headquarters buzzes Jack's watch and sends him in. He's got a few hours, a bag of gadgets, and one job: catch the thief, free the trapped scientist, and put the dinosaur back to sleep before it reaches the street. Every book drops him into a different country and a different quick, self-contained caper.
It's a spy adventure built for a child who wants action and a book short enough to actually finish. The chapters are quick, there's a map and a gadget list to pore over, and the whole mission wraps in one sitting. A reader who stalls on longer books gets a complete win in an afternoon. The danger is cartoon-movie danger, exciting without ever feeling real, and there's a long shelf of these behind it, each one set somewhere new. If your child has decided spies are the best thing going, there's a lot of fuel here.