SOCCER SCOOP

Christopher (see review, above) was treading water with this routine sports-story- cum-mystery. Someone is sending snide cartoons to the school newspaper featuring a motor-mouthed soccer goalie. Soccer goalie Mac Williams is determined to find out who is behind them. He complains to the principal, who shrugs it off as a First Amendment issue; Mac gathers circumstantial evidence, then falsely accuses a) Dougie, his best friend, b) Jimmy, the paper's sports reporter, and c) Billy, a teammate. The culprit is Billy's girlfriend, who, offended by Mac's remarks about her fellow's play, hoped to teach Mac a lesson. By the next page, everyone laughs it off. This is a decidedly minor effort: Even the sports action is vague and remote when it's not at Mac's end of the field. Readers may have trouble keeping the cast of similar-sounding characters straight, and the mystery is solved only after some heavily contrived stratagems. (Fiction. 10-12)