The Case of the Purple Pool by Lewis B. Montgomery, a Mysterious Review.

Review: The water in the neighborhood swimming pool has suddenly turned purple! How could this happen? Best friends Milo and Jazz decide to investigate in The Case of the Purple Pool, the seventh mystery in this series of early chapter mysteries by Lewis B. Montgomery.

Milo is anxious to show off "all the swimming stuff he'd learned at camp" when he learns a new boy, Noah, has moved into the neighborhood. Worse for Milo, he's from California and Milo's camp stories will pale next to Noah's tales of surfing the waves of the Pacific. Meanwhile, Jazz's sister Vanessa is trying to capture her summer experience by painting scenes of the season for an upcoming art show. Milo suggests swimming, picnics, volleyball, but Vanessa thinks everyone will be doing that. "I want to do something different." The very next day the pool is closed due to its water being purple. Is this what Vanessa had in mind when she said she wanted to do something "different"?

The premise of this series is that Milo and Jazz are correspondence students of the great private investigator Dash Marlowe. Their lesson this week is about "circumstantial evidence". They might not have actually seen a crime committed, but a good place to start is to infer from what evidence they have what might have happened and then set about proving their hypothesis.

From a mystery plot perspective, The Case of the Purple Pool may be one of the better in this series. There are only a handful of suspects, but the evidence could point to any one of them as the culprit. The resolution isn't quite as clever as it could be — Milo and Jazz don't actually figure it out — but the overall storyline is well executed.

The book concludes with several pages of "Super Sleuthing Strategies" that include word games, various puzzles, and a "30-second" mini-mystery.

The publisher recommends this book for children aged 7 to 11 with a reading level of RL-3. The Case of the Purple Pool has a Lexile measure of 450L.

Acknowledgment: The Kane Press provided a copy of The Case of the Purple Pool for this review.

The Case of the July 4th Jinx
The Kane Press (Trade Paperback), August 2010
ISBN-13: 9781575653082; ISBN-10: 1575653087

The Case of the Purple Pool

The Milo & Jazz Mysteries by Lewis B. Montgomery