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Read on for sample chapters from Amanda Lester and the Orange Crystal Crisis!
LESTRADE, MEET HOLMES
Amanda Lester wasn’t ready for what she’d just heard. Life was already weird enough at Legatum Continuatum, the secret school for descendants of famous detectives, in England’s Lake District. After the events of the last few months, including her father’s kidnapping, two murders, a teacher’s disappearance, an explosion, and a criminal plot to corner the world’s sugar market, she was battered, fed up, and downright depressed, especially since one of the kidnappers had turned out to be the boy she thought was her best friend. So when she arrived at Headmaster Thrillkill’s office on the first day of the new term and overheard one of the teachers say that the school was facing the worst crisis in its history, her first impulse was to run. But when she caught the word “Moriarty,” she couldn’t help listening, even though she knew eavesdropping was wrong. And that was when all the trouble started, or at least this round of trouble.
Moriarty, of course, was the master criminal Blixus Moriarty, whom Amanda had helped catch just a few weeks before. Elegant, brilliant, and cruel, he was at least as dangerous as his infamous ancestor Professor James Moriarty, archenemy of the renowned detective Sherlock Holmes. Even though Blixus was locked away in Her Majesty’s Prison at Manchester, nicknamed Strangeways, and his wife, Mavis, in Holloway Castle in London, the detectives who ran Legatum kept him under constant surveillance. And now, it appeared, there was news.
Amanda moved as close to the door as she could without being seen and closed her eyes so she could hear every word.
“I’m starting to think we’re out of luck,” said one of the teachers. “This is a catastrophe.”
“You’re overreacting,” said another. “There are still places to search. It will turn up.”
“Hogwash,” said a third. “The Moriartys have it.”
“If that’s the case,” said yet another, “it’s gone. It wasn’t in their possession when they were captured, or in their rooms here at the school. It must have been destroyed in the fire.”
The teacher was referring to the fire that that had killed the Moriartys’ son Nick, aka Nick Muffet, and destroyed the sugar factory where their cartel had manufactured deadly sugar-powered weapons—the factory where they had created a virus that tainted their competitors’ products. The same factory that had housed Schola Sceleratorum, the secret school for criminals, where Amanda had discovered that Nick wasn’t the person he’d claimed to be. The factory where they’d held her father and beat him till he nearly died. That factory, which Nick had deliberately destroyed by igniting the highly flammable sugar dust inside.
“Look,” said the evidence teacher. “Whatever happens, we can’t alarm the students or the parents. We have to keep this quiet.”
“I think we can all agree on that,” said Headmaster Thrillkill.
“It wasn’t our fault,” said the dead bodies teacher.
“No, of course not,” said the self-defense teacher. “We did everything in our power to protect it.”
“I don’t think we did,” said the poisons teacher. “If we had, it would be here, wouldn’t it?”
“I don’t see how you can say that,” said the police procedures teacher. “I’ve got the checklist right here. See? Every requirement followed to the letter up until the 22nd of February. Then boom, gone. What else could we have done?”
“Fault is not the issue,” said Thrillkill. “The point is that the situation is dire. We need to correct it immediately. Suggestions?”
This was freaky. Amanda had never heard the teachers talk this way before. She’d never seen them panic, and that scared the wits out of her. These were hardened detectives with years of experience. They’d faced down the world’s most evil criminals without blinking. Or had they? What was that crack in Professor Also’s armor she’d seen the time someone had mentioned the Khyber Pass? Or when Professor Ducey had slipped and accidentally revealed that someone in his family had been a dirty cop? Even if they’d occasionally made mistakes, she was certain that these people were the toughest in the world—the Navy Seals of detecting—and they were close to unflappable. Except that now they were flapping like a pair of your grandfather’s BVDs in a hurricane. The situation was more than unsettling. It was downright weird.
“Hey, you’re eavesdropping!”
Amanda whirled around to see that prissy little Wiffle kid standing before her, the one who was always getting on her case about not following the rules. What a Goody Two-shoes he was, always complaining that her behavior didn’t measure up to some mythical standard. And here he was doing it again, except this time she was eavesdropping, and if he tattled the teachers would be furious.
“Shut up,” she said in a stage whisper. “Thrillkill asked me to come to his office.”
“Not like this,” said the kid, who seemed to have gotten a really bad haircut over the break. His pale red hair looked as if someone had taken a machete to it. “You’re not supposed to listen to other people’s conversations.”
“I’m not listening,” she protested. “I’m waiting for a lull.”
“Are too.”
“Am not.”
“Are—”
“What’s going on out there?” Headmaster Thrillkill poked his head out. His beard was covered with crumbs. “Oh, Miss Lester, I’m glad to see you. I have a task for you. Will you please stop by my office after your classes? Now off you go.” He shooed the two first-years off, then turned back to the teachers and closed the door behind him.
“He’s going to give it to you,” said the kid. “Wish I were a fly on the wall. Probably something about how you helped that crook Nick Muffet infiltrate the school and—”
“You are a fly,” said Amanda. “You’re nothing but a bug, David Wiffle. I feel sorry for you. Go back to your dog poop.”
“Ha ha! You wish. You just can’t deal with the fact that I’m descended from an aristocrat. I’ll have you know that my ancestor, Sir Bailiwick Wiffle, was the most popular and successful detective of the 1930s, way beyond . . .”
But Amanda wasn’t listening. What was up with Thrillkill? He hadn’t taken them to task for their arguing, and he’d given no indication that he thought they’d been eavesdropping. The omission only added to Amanda’s worry, especially because he didn’t seem to remember that he’d asked her to come to his office in the first place.
What could the headmaster want from her? Did it have anything to do with the argument the teachers were having? She didn’t want to know. The man had thawed a bit by the end of last term, but he was still demanding, gruff, and awkward. And yet if she didn’t know what he wanted she would be caught unaware by whatever it was, and that might be even more unpleasant.
“And by the way, it wasn’t cool what you and that criminal did to me. You got me in a lot of trouble over that kicking thing. I’m not done with you, Lester.”
Wiffle was referring to the time he’d accidentally injured Amanda with an errant kick in self-defense class. Despite her antagonism toward him, she had taken the high road and insisted that it was an accident, but Nick, who always came to the rescue, had tried to punch him and ended up twisting his ankle. The teacher had punished the kid anyway, and now he’d never let her forget that there was a permanent note in his file.
“You don’t scare me, chicken hawk,” she said. She glanced at the clock. “OMG, you’re going to be late to class. Can’t afford another detention, can you?”
Wiffle took one look and started running toward their observation class. He was so predictable.
Am
anda knew she should go too, but suddenly she heard the name “Holmes” from behind the door. Oh brother. It was probably the new kid—Sherlock Holmes’s descendant, Scapulus Holmes, whom Thrillkill had mentioned at the end of last term. What was he going to be like? And what could he possibly have to do with the missing item? Did they think he had taken it?
It was true that a few short months ago Amanda would have done anything to avoid Sherlock Holmes. And it was true that now she was somewhat less sensitive, although not entirely sanguine, about the man who’d made her own ancestor, Inspector G. Lestrade of Scotland Yard, and by extension her, a laughingstock. She had finally decided that she was no longer embarrassed to be the descendant of a police detective known by all to be a dodo. She was pretty sure she had resolved all that. Lestrade wasn’t her and she wasn’t him. She was going to be the greatest detective ever, as well as the greatest filmmaker, her life’s desire, despite her duddy genes. But theory was one thing and practice another. The new kid was probably here, right now, doing his worst. This was getting juicy as well as nerve-racking. She had to find out more.
“Chop, chop,” Miss Lester, said Professor Mukherjee, the legal issues teacher, who had suddenly emerged from Thrillkill’s office to look for something in the anteroom. “We don’t want to be late on the first day of class, do we?”
Nuts. There was no way she’d hear anything now. “Er, no, Professor. I was just . . . I’m on my way.”
Oh well. If whatever it was was that important, there would be other opportunities to find out about it. Truth be told, Amanda was looking forward to seeing this legendary Holmes. Thrillkill had said that he wanted her to show him the ropes. Her! Little did he know that she was the last person who should be doing that. All she’d have to do was take one look at the boy and she’d throw up—a stunt she’d become well known for ever since that first day of spring term when she’d hurled all over poor Simon Binkle’s jacket. Fortunately Simon was now a friend, although he could still be irritating in a nerdish sort of way.
But between that incident and the one in the dead bodies, aka pathology, class, where she’d made the entire class puke, she had quite a reputation and didn’t want to enhance it. She just knew, though, that this Holmes kid was going to be trouble, although what sort of trouble she wasn’t sure. She was pretty sure he’d be arrogant. These sorts of things ran in families: the Wiffle family was arrogant, the Moriarty family was arrogant, Sherlock Holmes was arrogant, ergo their descendants would be the same. She wondered if Professor Ducey, the logic teacher, would buy that argument. It seemed airtight to her.