Half Moon Investigations

Meet Fletcher Moon.


Half-pint schoolboy and fully qualified private investigator. Since graduating online, he has solved all sorts of minor mysteries at school and at home. It was only a matter of time before things got serious...


These are strange days in the town of Lock. There has been a spate of odd crimes, including the theft of something very special belonging to one April Devereux. Fletcher investigates – and the finger of suspicion is soon pointing firmly in the direction of the notorious Sharkey brothers, Harod and Red.


It looks like an open and shut case.


But nothing is quite as it seems. And, as Fletcher delves deeper, it‘s not long before the hunter becomes the hunted...


This book was a lot of fun and I liked it a lot. A lot of the great mystery books for the YA crown tend to feature protagonists that rely solely on their intellect to deduce crimes and foil bad guys. Fletcher Moon’s intentions are to do the same but this junior G-man’s story reads more like a junior hard-boiled novel then the brain games associated with other child sleuths. The Great Brain never got beat up, Encyclopedia Brown never had an informant and The Hardy Boys never got arrested.


The opening of the book sets the tone for the rest of the book and grabs you right from the start. It also serves you notice that it intends to be something familiar but different at the same time.

This book has a lot of strengths. Once the story proper kicks in the pace only gets faster and faster. The characters are in are in some ways characters that we knew growing up: the popular, the rich, the misunderstood and the outsider but they become fully fleshed out and mange to rise above their John Hughes imposed stations. The plot and the characters manage to really throw some surprises and twists at you.


Adult mystery readers, and those parents who filch their child’s books when no one is looking, will find things like subtle tweaks of the genre. For example a lot of PI’s are alcoholics, it’s a genre staple that has become cliché over the years, but in this book the main character is a chocoholic, he just cant get enough of those chocolate bars. Also since Fletcher is actually a licensed PI he has a handbook that he carries around with him offering up nuggets of wisdom that are meant to govern any situation. Some of them are:




A number of them get proven wrong as Fletcher learns not to trust the book so much. Almost every one of them offers up some form of subtle commentary on the genre and many of them are priceless.”


The bottom line is that I devoured this book in a couple of sittings and can’t recommend it enough.


--Brian Lindenmuth