More Secrets, More Alliances, and More Bad Jokes From Dan.

Book: The Sword Thief
Author: Peter Lerangis
Pages: 156
Reading Level: Ages 9-12

I love being able to follow along with a series as the books come out. The anticipation of waiting for the next book always makes me somehow euphoric in a weird, booky way. I love it. So when the next entry in The 39 Clues came out, I had to pick it up. This time around, the book was written by Peter Lerangis, an author I must admit I had not heard of before picking up The Sword Thief, the third book in this highly marketable series by Scholastic.

The story picks right up from where One False Note (book 2) ended off, so it would definitely be hard to just jump right in. You've got to really start back at book 1 (The Maze of Bones) and work your way through. Not that reading these is work -- they fly through pretty quickly. In fact, The Sword Thief is the shortest of the three so far, coming in at a mere 156 pages.

This time, Dan and Amy are off to Japan, but they've been separated by their scheming relatives from their au pair, Nellie Gomez. And they'll have to work along with Alistair Oh in order to solve the next clue in the whole big puzzle. There is definitely plenty of adventure and Lerangis handles the action scenes fairly well. I felt that this book moved along a little more swiftly than One False Note, which had a few moments of "slowness." We find out more clues to the overall Cahill secret, and some interesting details about Amy and Dan's past.

One of the only things that somewhat confused me at times was the incessant head-hopping that Lerangis did. One minute we're in Dan's head. Then a few pages later we're in Amy's, then in Ian Kabra, then Alistair Oh, then back to Ian, and on to Natalie. It was a little bit confusing at times, but I can see how Lerangis wanted to build on a couple of the different characters and develop them a bit -- which makes for probably what will end up being a few different plot twists later on in the series.

Overall, this is another decent entry in a pretty fun, sometimes forgettable, series that has some really great potential. I can't wait to see what Jude Watson will do with book #4...

--originally posted on Amazon.com.