Renee Hand

I basically received a free copy of this book through a giveaway by the author on an internet site. The following is my honest opinion for the book.

Renee Hand has done a superb job in animalizing her “human” characters which aids children in wanting to read the book by making it more interesting by grabbing their attention. The author in the course of writing this book, has stealthily made it a learning experience as well for its young readers with not only explanations during the course show more of the storyline but in the glossary contained at the back of the book. It’s here the author not only gives some additional scientific information regarding the weather, and experiments parents can do with their children, but gives a brief biography of the real artists represented in the book by its animal characters.

As you follow Joe-Joe Nut and his ever-close companion, Biscuit Bill; those familiar with Sherlock Holmes, can’t but notice a close resemblance with regards to their investigative techniques as they zero in on the final solution and the ultimate secret of the missing arch. And as the famed fictional sleuth would say, “When you eliminate all other possibilities; what remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth [answer].”

To aid its young readers in enjoying the book even more are the vivid descriptions written by the author and the wonderful illustrations done by Jake Karwoski.

Considering all the various elements this book contains, I can’t but give this book 5 STARS. Hopefully in the future I’ll get to read more of this author’s creative endeavors.

Robin Leigh Morgan is the author of “I Kissed a Ghost,” a MG/YA Paranormal romance novel as well as the author of "Micro Fiction - An Anthology." show less

The Crypto-Capers in the Legend of the Golden Monkey is the third in a six-book series of a young group of cyber age detectives known as The Crypto Capers. It's a little bit like a modern day Encyclopedia Brown. I found this book to be a fun read; well written with the adventure unraveling quickly. In fact, it feels more like a mini-adventure; or perhaps a few chapters out of a larger adventure book. In fact I think that would have been ideal, if several of these books had been combined into show more a larger book. As it was, it went by very quickly and I was a bit let down at the brevity of the book, and VERY LET down by the abrupt "To Be Continued" ending. Other than that, even as the third book in the series it read fine as a stand alone book. The characters were well depicted and the action interesting and easy to follow. Another disappointment for me, was the sparsity of cryptogram puzzles, which the book was touted to include. It does, but only two of them, I think; which seemed like a let down, and rather odd considering I thought it would be chock full of them. But all-in-all , middle grade students should enjoy this book, and this series.

In this particular case, the Crypto Capers find themselves in the Mexican Riviera exploring the ancient Mayan Ruins and looking for missing treasure. But they had better hurry, because they are not the only ones! They also have to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys and ultimately save their new friend whose family is intimately involvee in the disappearance of the Mayan artifacts. show less

The Crypto-Capers in: The Legend of the Golden Monkey is kid-oriented detective story about young siblings Max and Mia and their chaperone, Granny, all three of whom work for the Crypto-Capers, a crack team of mystery solvers with all manner of high-tech gadgetry at their disposal. In this volume of the series, Max, Mia, and Granny have been sent to Chichen Itza to investigate the disappearance of a pair of Mayan tablets and to find the infamous treasure (the titular golden monkey) that the show more tablets are supposed to lead to.

Overall Legend of the Golden Monkey is a fun page-turner. Renee Hand clearly enjoys building suspense and is quite skilled at it. The characters are all interesting and well-rounded, and I thought that the inclusion of various types of puzzles throughout the text for readers to solve was a clever touch.

I did have a few concerns about the structure of the book, however, and some aspects of the puzzles. The puzzles were certainly fun to work out, but their relationship to the text seemed a little tenuous. One of the puzzles (the Mayan numbers puzzle) gave conflicting information about what should be done with the numbers before the puzzle was presented, and I can foresee that being frustrating for a lot of children, especially because there was no textual confirmation of the answers for most of the puzzles. The answers to the number puzzle were given much later in the book, but none of the text puzzles have confirmation provided for the correct answers at all--either through direct statement by the characters, or by using the correct answer as a clue to solve the main mystery. I found this somewhat irritating, but I imagine that children who have more investment in the story might be more than just irritated.

**(Be forewarned that spoilers are below)**

In fact, it is implied numerous times throughout the book that the puzzle answers will serve as clues to the main mystery, but they don't end up doing so because (and this is my concern with the structure of the book) the mystery is never actually solved. At least not in this episode. The end of the book is a total cliffhanger, with the Crypto-Capers team left in mid-adventure, searching for the second tablet. I'm all for cliffhangers, but it seems like it might have been more appropriate for the team to at least have encountered the golden monkey in this book, given the title. I found it pretty disheartening that there was no payoff at the end of this episode. It seems like a clumsy way to write a mystery novel--I was left as much dissatisfied that all the work that went into solving the puzzles ended up meaning nothing in the context of this book as I was intrigued to find out what happened to the team after the sticky situation they were in at the end of the book. Perhaps this method will make more sense once Renee Hand has written more of the series and it will be easier to jump forward from volume to volume, but for now it's doing her no favors.

I also noticed that there were a lot of typos and other errors throughout the book. I assume that as this was a review copy these will all be corrected before general sale of the book, so ordinarily I would not comment on this, but some of the errors were significant enough to give me pause, such as the mis-numbering of the chapters so that chapter 3 was omitted entirely.

I did enjoy the book, and although Renee Hand clearly has some work to do to tidy up both this book and the series overall, I would likely recommend it for young children who enjoy mystery stories and like a good puzzle challenge. show less

Miranda accepted Lord Hammil's proposal for marriage in an attempt to use him to taking her to an island where she could find her missing father. The real question which must be answered is who is playing whom? In a wonderfully mastered game of backstabbing and deceit, this book will keep you turning pages. This story is a hot sexy swashbuckling good time filled with love, lies, and dangerous pasts which keep causing trouble.
I only have a couple of complaints about this novel, first Miranda show more spent the whole book learning about sword fighting I would much rather have had a sword dual at the end instead of a single shot this ending was kind of anticlimactic after all of the build-up. Second there was a group of characters added at the end with extensive backgrounds, while I agree these characters are important to the plot they were not developed enough throughout the book and they seemed like an afterthought to tie up loose ends, but they only added more questions. Those issues aside I would still highly recommend this book to anyone who likes romance, adventure, and pirates. show less