Hooray! The wonderful Bedective Deans…oops Detective Beans, that clever, daring favourite professional kitten sleuth is back. He’s been sorting through his top-secret files and put together a collection of stories about his many adventures from around Cat Town. He first appeared in Detective Beans & The Case of the Missing Hat, a full length story full of incident and crazy characters.
Li Chen is a remarkable graphic artist using colour and line to create charming expressive characters that immediately grip and keep your attention. She has lots of fun with language, varying in tone from formal business or science speak to informal friendly and everything in between. She is very good at Mum speak.
Framing the stories is Beans being live streamed by his friend Biscuits so its like watching/reading videos with some interruptions in between. The almost 30 stories vary in length and feature an array of villains and victims. There’s Mr Kipper who can’t find his work gloves, Mr Brickle who makes very peculiar icecreams, a very crafty burgled duck, and more. One of my favourites is when Biscuits comes over for a sleepover and they watch a scary movie featuring giant extraterrestial felines. Beans himself has ambitions to become a graphic artist and there are two comics of his, The Daily Detective, illustrated in a hand drawn, home produced style – very funny and starring Beans as agent 006½.
At the end there is a special edition of The Daily Detective featuring ‘bits and bobs’ including horoscopes (Virgo: beware of angry worms), a wordfinder, and a crossword. Both these books will appeal to quite a wide age and abilities range within middle grade because while the action is simple the language and context appeals to older readers too. Perfect for lovers of cats, graphic fiction, humorous stories and adventure.
