Jack finally receives a coded message from his brother Max, possibly detailing his whereabouts. But duty calls, and Jack is whisked away to the sweltering savannah of Kenya before he can decipher it. Once there, a wise and kind Masai chief alerts Jack to a series of elephant killings where the corpses have been robbed of their tusks. Jack must find the malevolent ring of poachers responsible before more of these endangered species are destroyed.
These books are an amazing series. They really provide a true spy series appropriate for young children. The "spies" are part of the GPF - Global Protection Force - an international spy ring devoted to promoting justice and made up entirely of kids. The books have great gadgets - this one features a Power Pogo Stick which allowed Jack, the protagonist, to leap 15 feet in the air and help him escape a hungry pack of hunting lions, the Flyboard (one of Jack's all time favorite gadgets) that helped him soar in the air after the bad guys and a Lava Laser that when pointed at a piece of metal, made the metal so hot that it would burns someone's hands if they held on to the metal. Jack is a 9-year-old boy and it's great for kids to have a super-spy just like them. The books are also completely benign - no one really gets hurt, the bad guys always get caught, and the kids have whatever gadgets they need to get out of a bad situation (and all those gadgets fit in a normal-sized backpack.) Each book also focuses on a different country in the world and thus has an educational aspect to it in exposing children to different cultures (e.g. Kenya, Indonesia) and different political concepts (e.g. poaching, piracy). I pre-order each new book in the series and my 7 1/2-year-old son loves them when we read them aloud to him. (In this particular book, he was a little bit afraid of the snake.)
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