With her newest, the bestselling author journeys outside the big city and into a small town with new characters and challenges that are a departure for Balliett but are as wondrously mystifying as her previous titles. Now readers who fell in love with Petra, Calder and Tommy in follow-up mysteries that took the beloved Balliett characters into an endangered Frank Lloyd Wright house and on to England to pursue a missing sculpture will enter an entirely different world with the author’s fourth and latest middle-reader mystery, “The Danger Box,” which recently hit stores nationwide. It was a roller-coaster ride of a story that could easily have come off the rails but instead stayed on track with an endless array of unexpected but explainable plot twists that kept young readers questioning and turning pages. An unknown Chicago teacher had propelled herself to the top of the country’s bestseller lists with “Chasing Vermeer,” a tall tale crafted from the disparate, and not especially child-friendly, subjects of a 17th century Dutch painting, an ancient Greek puzzle game, a wrinkled old lady, a discarded library book and an art museum. When Blue Balliett burst onto the tween literary scene with her first action-packed intellectual art mystery six years ago, it was, in every sense, a puzzler.
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