THE FROG BAND AND THE ONION SELLER

This lovingly crafted (though lightly bound) period escapade stars Alphonse Le Flic, a Holmesian frog. He's engaged by Duke de Buffo Burro to recover an ancestral treasure, and we're off to its hiding place: a coastal monastery in Edwardian England. Once there, pursued by an enraged, tuba-wielding Frog Band, Alphonse finds the treasure and careens on bicycle through a seafront village, off a pier, into his submarine, and back to France and a grateful Duke. The plot is fast-paced and balmy, but the real delight's in the skillful narrative illustration, filled with interesting period detail--knickknacks, gramophones, flivvers, chamberpots--and varied by panoramas of crowded village streets and cutaways of the Duke's junk-filled chateau and the monastery's maze of tunnels. Daft, adventurous fun.