THE CASE OF THE FURTIVE FIREBUG

In the first installment of this new series by Nicholson (The Truth About George, not reviewed) and Warner (Colonial American Home Life, not reviewed), the Kerry Hill Casecrackers meet and solve their first mystery. 12-year-old Hally Watkins and her little brother, Jason, are spending the summer in Newport, R.I., with their father. Hally's first friend in the neighborhood, Nguyen Tuyet, is trying to make money over the summer to help her aunt and uncle, with whom she lives, buy the restaurant in which they work. She gets a job from mean Mr. Crowhurst to paint an apartment in one of the run-down houses he owns in the neighborhood, but the whole thing is actually a setup. Crowhurst wants to burn down the house for the insurance money but is afraid his insurers will be suspicious because another of his houses also recently burned down. He knows that Tuyet was a local sensation for nearly burning down her own house when she once experimented with cigarettes. He arranges it so that it looks like Tuyet has another similar accident. Only he didn't count on the Casecrackers. Although it's obvious to the kids that Tuyet is being framed, the way they prove it is both clever and believable. An extremely promising start for the Casecrackers. (Fiction. 9-12)