Escape from Fear, Gloria Skurzynski

We read Escape from Fear, a National Parks Mysteries novel, with our niece Rachel when we were down in the Virgin Islands.  The story is set there, so it was really fun to read.  The characters in this series are a family where the mother is a veterinarian who consults with the national parks and her husband and two children.  In this story she's been called to the National Park of the Virgin Islands where they are having turtle trouble.

The novels always give a lot of information about the park in addition to having an engaging storyline.  They usually require a little suspension of disbelief, and this one was no exception, but once you get past that, the suspense is high and are excellent reading.  I definitely recommend them as a family read-aloud, everyone is sure to enjoy the story.

I've written a couple of reviews for other books in the National Parks Mysteries series,  one here and one here.

Buried Alive - A National Parks Mystery, Gloria Skurzynski

This mystery is another great one in the series by Gloria Skurzynski and her daughter. They're all set in the national parks and all have the same family in them, the Landons. The mother in the family is a veterinarian and the parks people call her in when there's a mystery they can't solve with animals in the park. I'm paticularly partial to this one because the mystery centers around wolverines!

When one of our nieces or nephews turns 13 we take them to a national park of their choice, and this summer we took Logan to Denali in Alsaka. That's where this story is set, so it was fun to read about a place where we were and to spot things on our visit that were mentioned in the story. The high suspense in this story made it a great read-aloud, too. There's a mystery about the animals but about one of the people in the story, too, so there's lots going on.

This book is available in the WOMS library. I definitely recommend it and the others in the series that are there.

The Hunted - Gloria Skurzynski

I couldn't find a picture of this book, but this is a great mystery story. It's one of the National Geographic mysteries set in a national park. Last year I went to Denali with my nephew and we read one set there. This year we took another nephew to Glacier and read this one which is set there. We did it as a read-aloud, and as the reader I was having a hard time reading fast enough. This book was FULL of suspense. It was way more suspenseful than the other one we read. It was slightly less realistic in a few of the details ,but we forgave those because it was so exciting.

The main characters in this book are a brother and sister, the same ones who were in the other story. Their mother is a veterinarian and has been called in to help figure out why grizzly bear cubs are disappearing. The reason is a little bit scary, well actually a lot scary. And there's a whole side story about a ten year old Mexican boy as well.

If you like mysteries with a lot of suspense, this is a GREAT choice. Available at the WOMS library.