Review Detail

Alex and Zoe Sherlock are glad that school is out for the summer, but we start the book seeing that they are in rather a stressful situation with their grandfather; they are all escaping an exploding yacht off the coast in Miami, Florida. How did they get there? Well, it's always nice to have some discretionary income, so the two decide to start a business. Instead of walking dogs or babysitting, they decide to run a detective agency. Zoe does the research and has a solid business plan of passing out flyers and business cards, creating a social media presence, and even enlisting the help of their grandfather as their "director of transportation and logistics". Things get off to a slow start, but the two, along with friends Yadi and Lina, answer a text request for help and go to a local laundromat/coffee shop to meet their client. It turns out to be their mother, who is a lawyer, who has a LOT of concerns about their undertaking. Not only is it dangerous to go around meeting strangers, but she throws a lot of legalese at them. Their grandfather, a former Miami Herald investigative reporter, has an idea; what if they look at his cold case files and find one to research. After looking through the papers from his stuffed storage unit, the kids come up with two likely topics. They can either delve into the case of Murf the Surf, or try to find Al Capone's treasure. Capone's millions win out, and Grandpa assigns them each one of the five W's of journalism. They interview a few people they find through Grandpa's connections, and head out in Grandpa's aquamarine 1964 Cadillac Coupe de Ville to the Crandon Park Zoo to look for the location. They realize the years don't line up, so try another tactic. Yadi has drones, so instead of trekking through the Everglades, they decide to fly them over another likely spot. They find a lot of dead animals when they get near the location, and take a water sample back. What's going on? Zoe, who has been arguing a lot with her parents over the fact that they wouldn't send her to a trendy summer camp with her friends and has been generally surly, decides that the group should give up on the Capone treasure hunt and figure out what it going on. They comb through the footage and find some likely culprits and vehicles. Traveling back to Bailey's Bait and Tackle, they pretend to be filming a documentary, and get more information from Bailey. This leads them to Morris Kane, whose family has run Kane Crystals sugar refinery for decades, as well as local newspapers. They continue the documentary ruse with him, and find out plenty of information, and even identify one of his workers as a person in the video. When Lina leaves her recording device running when the group is asked to leave the room, she feels bad, especially since the mother has made the group carry consent forms and observe all the legal niceties before interviewing anyone. The kids have the grandfather listen to the tape, and he says it has nothing interesting... but it does. There is more than toxic waste dumping going on; the possibility that Kane and his cronies are illegally counterfeiting money MIGHT be the reason the CIA's Dale Tyree was called in after the kids were rescued from the yacht. If the CIA is involved, how big a deal is this? Once we catch up with the legal troubles caused by the yacht incident, there turns out to be a lot more at stake. Will the Sherlock Society have its first successful investigation?