Hold Your Spin Calgary, AB, Canada

An entertaining and enjoyable enough mystery about two sixth-graders - Calder and Petra - who find themselves, through a number of coincidences, the only two people able to rescue a stolen painting by Vermeer. For the most part the book rolls along pretty quickly, but it's a bit draggy in some areas and the ending is ridiculous (the coincidences too many, and a bit too tidy a wrap-up). I imagine younger readers would enjoy the code aspect, but I found it annoying to decipher the letters from Calder's friend, so I quit trying and just relied on what came after to work out their contents.

I'll probably never read this book again, but I'll keep it around in case I ever know a 11 year old in need of something to read.

Very enjoyable story. I can see why, as discussed in the afterword, Gaiman and Reaves thought this would make a good tv series: this book reads a bit like a season finale (except, of course, for the bit where we're introduced to this particular Joey Harker, but the scale of the story feels like a season finale).