By Stephan Pastis
The world's most confident and least competent boy detective narrates his own agency's cases, with a fifteen-hundred-pound polar bear as his business partner.
Timmy Failure is certain he runs the finest detective agency in town. He does not. He rides a Segway he isn't supposed to have, keeps losing the actual clues, and takes orders from Total, an enormous polar bear who is his business partner and mostly wants to eat. Timmy narrates the whole thing himself, completely sure of his own genius, while your child watches every case go gloriously sideways. It's a comedy first and a mystery second, told in cartoons and deadpan chapters that a reader races through.
This is the shelf's comedy pick, the one for a reader who loves Wimpy Kid and Big Nate and wants the mystery served with a laugh. The pages are half pictures, the chapters are short, and the humor is the deadpan kind that rewards a reader for getting the joke, so it pulls in a child who'd rather not read a 'real' book. The detective plot is really an excuse for the comedy, but a mystery-loving child gets to feel clever spotting what Timmy misses. There's a long series behind it if it lands.