TRAVIS AND FREDDY’S ADVENTURES IN VEGAS

Hatching an ill-considered scheme to escape financial woes by striking it rich in Las Vegas, preteen best buds—one an extreme jock, the other an equally extreme geek—discover, in this breezy debut, that Vegas is nothing like Walla Walla. With Travis’s gift for smooth talk nicely complementing Freddy’s ability to hack any security system, making a bundle at the blackjack tables (with some adult help from a friendly cabbie) turns out to be a snap. It’s surviving the subsequent pursuit of vicious local kingpin Johnny Large and his thugs Moose and No Neck that turns out to be the real challenge. The authors pack their cast with broadly drawn Vegas caricatures, and a slapstick plot with more implied than actual violence. Though at one point Travis and Freddy find themselves dangling from a 35th-floor window clad only in tighty-whities, and they never do get to keep the cash, they ultimately they walk away winners. Think Mission: Impossible meets Gordon Korman’s Son of the Mob (2002), with interwoven family issues providing just the right amount of ballast. (Fiction. 10-12)