The Quebec City Crisis

Dave Jenkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and the author of the “Portraits” section of Emergency Librarian.

Co-ed hockey and mystery combined with liberal dashes of humor has
proven to be a winning formula for the books in MacGregor’s Screech
Owl series. As in the previous six titles, sports and sleuthing are not
found in equal portions in every book. The Quebec City Crisis finds the
Screech Owls playing in one of the world’s most prestigious hockey
tournaments, the Quebec Peewee Invitational. The title’s “crisis,”
which becomes almost national in scope, occurs when Travis is asked to
keep a daily journal, with extracts to be published in the Montreal
Inquirer, a daily newspaper. Unfortunately, the reporter puts a negative
spin on Travis’s entries, one that makes Travis and his teammates
appear to be anti-French.

Its title notwithstanding, The Screech Owls’ Home Loss is the first
book in the series that does not revolve around a real or imagined
hockey tournament. Instead, the Screech Owls’ home community, Tamarck,
is blanketed in ice, making it the world’s largest skating rink. While
playing with his friends, Travis shares one of his father’s
reminiscences: “hitching” or grabbing the back bumpers of cars and
being dragged along on the ice. The group decides to try hitching, but
the results are catastrophic. Larry “Data” Ulmar is left largely
paralyzed after being run over by a hit-and-run driver who appears to
have been drunk. In addition to rallying around their
wheelchair-confined teammate, the Screech Owls set out to discover the
driver’s identity.

Nightmare in Nagano takes the Screech Owls to a post-Olympic tournament
in Nagano, Japan, where the mayor of Nagano is fatally poisoned at the
opening-night banquet. In addition to meeting the Americans in the
finals, the Screech Owls, with Data’s videotaping help, solve the
killing.

Throughout the trio of books, Nish continues to be a source of humor,
especially when he goes “home” to Japan. Three sure-fire hits with
early adolescents, especially reluctant readers. Recommended.