The Short Con by Pete Toms

The Short Con by Pete Toms
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really thought this was a lot of fun. A rich orphan girl gets put into an orphanage home below her station and finds the whole thing is run as a detective agency or cop shop. Mary becomes the partner of "Pops" and a girl who specializes in forensics on the homicide team. I'm not sure the appropriate age range for this as it is a simple entertaining story for kids, but the language is aimed more at the higher educated. Pops has a habit of calling people names such as Jane Eyre, Gertrude Stein, Howard Hughes and Virginia Woolf to just name a few. The first time "Pops" speaks to Mary he asks her to have her existential crisis somewhere else. I found this humour hilarious, but think the understanding will come for older children. This is the first in a series and I'd certainly read the next one.