SAMANTHA SANDERSON: WITHOUT A TRACE BY ROBIN CAROLL

This middle-grade mystery (the fourth in a series about the tween amateur sleuth Samantha Sanderson) wasn’t quite what I was expecting. Overall, I’d call it a disappointment. The characters were a little stylized. Samantha is the typical pronounced over-achiever presented as a role model, with up-tempo school involvement, adult-level social and reasoning skills, a tight set of friends, and the perfect set of high-achieving-wonderfully-compatible parents. (In this case a detective and a famous journalist.) The story overall— about the apparent kidnapping of a boy from school, solved by the very curious young Samantha—was okayish. Not special—but okay.

 Several times a website on which sexual predators prowled for kids was mentioned and at one time the girls believed they might be chatting with such a person when they hacked into the missing boy’s account. The topic wasn’t really explored, giving a different tone to the book without producing much benefit. Plus, an adult character turned out to have a secret, elaborate “panic” room in his home, fitted out with TVs and computers. The man had kept knowledge of the room from his family, and his wife’s reactions seemed more in line with finding mountains of illicit sexual material than a storm shelter hidden for some very weird reason. As it was, this plot angle was simply silly and really awkward.

 So I’d pass on this book. Just not very special, with one or two flaws. There’s a lot of books in the series though, so maybe I just got a weak one.