Framed! by James Ponti
6/10
Florian Bates is a Kid Detective who is known by pretty much no one as ‘Young Sherlock,’ according to the author. He notices things people miss, like how if one of your hands is more tanned than the other it means you were playing golf on your business trip to California with rented clubs and also you’re right-handed and you had oatmeal for breakfast and you dream of being a fighter pilot.
Anyhoo, Florian Bates is programmed to be super smart in this book because the author needed an exciting main character. His best friend, Margaret, is also super smart of course in addition to being a Mary Sue (she is literally perfect at everything she tries to do, ever).
Florian’s parents are museum workers and he stumbles into an art heist case. He gets a few early details right and the F.B.I. decides to have him meet the Director of the F.B.I. because sure and so he meets him and notices he has some burgundy socks or something and is therefore able to tell him his entire life story.
The F.B.I. Director has Florian hired as a consultant and has him given one afternoon of training. He’s now ready for life as an F.B.I. agent/consultant! Florian spends the rest of the book trying to figure out the rest of the art case and not getting very far, and then noticing a tattoo on someone’s arm and deducing that the obscure tattoo which could have meant anything actually meant something extremely specific that no one on the planet could have possibly guessed.
GOOD
It was a quick read and doesn’t get bogged down in irrelevant plot points.
Florian could have been more annoying than he was but he turned out relatively OK. He’s not very humble but he works pretty hard at trying to put the pieces together so you don’t feel that all the answers just fly into his brain for free when he needs them.
BAD
Several plot points just completely ring false. The F.B.I. isn’t going to let a kid help them. And if they did, they wouldn’t let that kid take classified evidence home to put on his detective wall.
Florian is a genius but he doesn’t think to Google “Our American Cousin” when the F.B.I. sends him a code to meet at Ford’s Theatre. Instead he thinks about it all day long and then finally figures it out.
Kidnapping Florian was an innocent misunderstanding? And why did the villain think Florian worked for the F.B.I.? This was never explained.
So, a few plot holes and a few bumps. Overall it was fine for 5th-ish graders, the intended audience. It’s more exciting than Encyclopedia Brown, who only solved neighborhood crimes.
6/10