The Further Adventures of Jack Lime by James Leck, a Mysterious Review.

Review: What you are about to read are some of the more interesting cases that have crossed my desk. You see, I'm a detective, a private investigator, a gumshoe. What I do is fix problems for people who need their problems fixed. My name is Jack Lime, and these are my stories.

This second book to feature the young teen PI includes three investigations: "The Case of the Missing Quarterback", "The Case of the Red Envelope", and "The Comic Book Caper". All are narrated by Jack Lime in a noirish pulp fiction-style, as when a client tells him that she's in love.

When you get a little older and wiser, you'll learn that love is just another word that starts with an L, like loser, lonely, and liar.

The first case is nicely structured and shows off Jack's talents: his deductive skills and almost as importantly his ability to deftly handle the complexity of interpersonal relationships, especially those of high school students. School reporter KC Stone — "thick red hair held back by a pair of sunglasses, freckles across her nose and [wearing] a white T-shirt with the words The Truth Hurts fading away across the front" — makes for an entertaining foil to Jack.

The second case picks up a couple of days after the first — "It was a dismal day. It was raining and cold, the kind of cold that seeps under your skin and eats away at your bones." — and isn't nearly as strongly written from a plot perspective. Jack is hired to find a missing painting, a little far afield from his normal work, especially when it turns out to be a "crime of passion".

Finally, the third story opens with KC and Jack eating pumpkin pie at his grandma's kitchen table, where he recounts to her the circumstances surrounding a stolen Captain Marvel comic book. ("It was raining buckets of cats and pails of dogs as I hustled down to the train station. I was soaked with I arrived and slipped into an out-of-the-way corner where I stood dripping and waiting for the goons to show up.") The case here is surprisingly complex, not necessarily complicated but involving far more than just the activities of the students Jack is usually associated with.

Overall these are entertaining stories that are largely centered on the hectic life of an in-demand teen private investigator and rather less so on the mystery at hand. Jack Lime doesn't exactly stumble around, "solving crimes through sheer luck", as one culprit accuses him, but the statement isn't too far wrong.

Acknowledgment: Kids Can Press provided an eARC of The Further Adventures of Jack Lime for this review.

The Adventures of Jack Lime
Kids Can Press (Hardcover), February 2010
ISBN-13: 9781554533657; ISBN-10: 1554533651

The Further Adventures of Jack Lime

A Jack Lime Mystery Short Story Collection by James Leck