Publisher Description

It's a murder mystery on the moon in this humorous and suspenseful space adventure from the author of Belly Up and Spy School that The New York Times Book Review called "a delightful and brilliantly constructed middle grade thriller." Like his fellow lunarnauts--otherwise known as Moonies--living on Moon Base Alpha, twelve-year-old Dashiell Gibson is famous the world over for being one of the first humans to live on the moon. And he's bored out of his mind. Kids aren't allowed on the lunar surface, meaning they're trapped inside the tiny moon base with next to nothing to occupy their time--and the only other kid Dash's age spends all his time hooked into virtual reality games. Then Moon Base Alpha's top scientist turns up dead. Dash senses there's foul play afoot, but no one believes him. Everyone agrees Dr. Holtz went onto the lunar surface without his helmet properly affixed, simple as that. But Dr. Holtz was on the verge of an important new discovery, Dash finds out, and it's a secret that could change everything for the Moonies--a secret someone just might kill to keep...

Author Biography

Stuart Gibbs is the New York Times bestselling author of the Charlie Thorne series, FunJungle series, Moon Base Alpha series, Once Upon a Tim series, and Spy School series. He has written screenplays, worked on a whole bunch of animated films, developed TV shows, been a newspaper columnist, and researched capybaras (the world's largest rodents). Stuart lives with his family in Los Angeles. You can learn more about what he's up to at StuartGibbs.com.

Review

*STARRED REVIEW* The whodunit is smartly paced and intricately plotted. Best of all, the reveal is actually worth all the buildup. Thrillers too often fly off the rails in their final moments, but the author's steady hand keeps everything here on track. Fully absorbing."-- "Kirkus Reviews"

Review Quote

"This zany sci-fi/adventure/murder mystery won't sit around gathering moondust, especially with such an eye-catching cover!; highly recommended for your middle-grade mystery collection."

Excerpt from Book

Space Case EVIL PLUMBING Earth year 2041 Lunar day 188 Smack in the middle of the night Let''s get something straight, right off the bat: Everything the movies have ever taught you about space travel is garbage. Giant spacecraft that are as comfortable as floating cruise ships? Complete fantasy. Warp-speed travel? Never going to happen. Holodecks? Terraforming? Beaming up? Don''t count on any of it. Life in outer space sucks. Trust me, I know. My name is Dashiell Gibson. I''m twelve years old and I live on the moon. On Moon Base Alpha, to be exact. You know this, of course. Everyone on earth knows this, unless they''ve been living in the Amazon rain forest for the last few years, and since there''s barely anything left of the Amazon rain forest, I''m guessing that''s unlikely. Moon Base Alpha--along with everyone who lives on it--has been the subject of an absolutely staggering amount of hype: The first human outpost in space! The first people to live on a celestial body besides earth! A glorious first step in mankind''s ultimate colonization of the galaxy! The government fed my family all that baloney as well, back when they recruited my parents. And I admit, I completely fell for it. We all did. The recruiters made everything sound so amazing: Moon Base Alpha would have all the comforts of earth--and more. We''d go down in history as one of the first families to live in space. We''d be the newest breed of pioneers, pushing the limits of human achievement. Like I said: garbage. Living in Moon Base Alpha is like living in a giant tin can built by government contractors. It''s as comfortable as an oil refinery. You can''t go outside, the food is horrible, it''s always cold--and the toilets might as well be medieval torture devices. Ever notice how, in all the science-fiction movies and TV shows you''ve ever seen--Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica and all 142 versions of Star Trek--no one ever goes to the bathroom? That''s not because, in the future, everyone has figured out how to metabolize their own feces. It''s because going to the bathroom in space is a complete pain in the butt. Literally. At least the moon-base toilet is better than the one on the spaceship we took here. In zero gravity, you have to take extreme precautions to ensure that whatever comes out of your body doesn''t fly up into your face. (There''s an old saying in zero-g space travel: If you ever see a piece of chocolate floating around the cabin, don''t eat it. It''s probably not chocolate.) However, using the toilet on Moon Base Alpha is no picnic. If I''d known how exceptionally complicated and disgusting it would be, I never would have agreed to leave earth. It was because of one of those evil toilets that I wound up involved in far more trouble and danger than I ever could have imagined. * * * Now, before you get the idea that I''m some whiny, ungrateful kid who just likes to complain and wouldn''t be happy anywhere . . . I''m not. Before my family made the awful decision to come live on the moon, I was happy as any kid you''ve ever met. Happier, maybe. We lived on the Big Island of Hawaii, which was awesome. Mom worked at the W. M. Keck Observatory, which runs the telescopes on the peak of Mauna Kea. Although the scopes are thirteen thousand feet up, they''re managed remotely from the town of Waimea, which meant we could live down by the beach. So my childhood was pretty idyllic. I had lots of friends. I did well in school and played on every sports team. I surfed every weekend--and when I did, there were usually dolphins in the waves with me. Then the government came calling. See, my parents have a very unique set of skills. Mom is a lunar geologist who wrote some landmark papers about the moon and the consistency of its mantle and core. Dad is a mining engineer with a specialty in environmentally sound mineral extraction. And one of the major reasons for the moon base is to explore the possibility of mining precious metals there. Separately, Mom and Dad would each have been solid candidates for Moon Base Alpha. Together, they were an impossible combination to beat. Space is limited on the moon. With them, NASA got two scientists without having to send two separate families. So they wanted my folks badly. We got the full-court press. Politicians called us. The chairman of NASA came to visit. We were all flown to Washington, DC, first class for lunch with the vice president. And every last one of them lied to our faces about how great it would be to live on the moon. They made it sound like MBA was going to be incredible. Like our lives there would be nonstop thrills and amazement. Imagine hearing that you''ve just won a free three-year stay in the most luxurious hotel in the most insane location imaginable. Oh, and you get to be famous, too. Not flash-in-the-pan, one-hit-wonder, reality-TV famous. Have-kids-learn-about-you-in-school-a-hundred-years-from-now famous. We were going to be lumped in with the greatest explorers of all time, maybe even score our own chapter in the history books: Columbus. Magellan. Neil Armstrong. The Harris-Gibson Family of Moon Base Alpha. It all sounded too good to pass up. So we said yes. We spent the next year training--but then, you know that. All the families who were headed for MBA became celebrities right off the bat. (NASA tried to get everyone to refer to us as lunarnauts, but the public ended up calling us "Moonies" instead.) The whole world watched all our preparations for life on the moon, our multiple aborted launch attempts, and finally our successful blastoff into space and our triumphant arrival at our new home. And now that we''re on the moon, millions of people are still following our lives via webcams and ComLinks and beam-feeds. And yet, despite all that, you earthlings never get to see the whole story. Instead you see the edited and sanitized version. There''s too much at stake to allow anything else through. We Moonies are barred from broadcasting, texting, or transmitting anything to the public that might be "detrimental to the success of Moon Base Alpha." (And if we try, NASA has censors who''ll delete it before it goes public.) We can''t complain about the toilets or the food or the malfunctioning equipment. We can''t mention that anything has ever gone wrong. We have to constantly present a positive face to the public, even when there is nothing to be positive about. Which is why no one on earth has ever heard about the murder. * * * I only got involved because I had to use the space toilet at two fifteen in the morning. On the moon this is a major endeavor, because we don''t have a toilet in our private living quarters. (Something else the government neglected to mention when talking up the moon base.) Space toilets cost more than thirty million bucks a piece. So instead of springing for one for each family, the moon-base designers only bought six and placed them all in the communal bathrooms, three for the girls and three for the guys. The living quarters are all in one section of the base, but the geniuses who designed MBA put the bathrooms on the opposite side. The "logical" explanation for this was that the bathrooms would be closer to the work and dining areas, where we--in theory--would spend most of our awake time. Unfortunately, this means that when the urge to purge strikes in the middle of the night, you have to get dressed, leave your quarters, cross the base, use the complicated toilet, and then head back again. It can take fifteen minutes--or more if the toilet jams, which happens far more often than anyone predicted. Everyone at MBA loathes the entire process. Sometimes I can resist the call of nature and go back to sleep, but on that night I knew it was useless. I''d had chicken parmigiana for dinner. Sort of. Like all our meals, it was a shrink-wrapped block of precooked food that had been irradiated, thermostabilized, dehydrated, and compacted, which meant it didn''t taste anything like chicken parm back home. In fairness, a few space foods are actually pretty good--shrimp cocktail and chocolate pudding, for example--but for the most part they all taste like wet sawdust. Some of the other moon kids and I once did a blind taste test of three theoretically different space foods: beef stroganoff, blueberry pancakes, and chicken tikka masala. No one was able to tell the difference. While almost everything tastes the same going in, though, it all has drastically different effects on my digestive tract. Chicken parm is the worst. It had sent me racing to the john in the middle of the night twice before, so I had avoided it like the plague ever since. But on that night, I screwed up. All the meals don''t merely taste alike. They also look alike. Once you''ve irradiated, thermostabilized, dehydrated, and compacted a meal, it doesn''t look like food anymore; it looks like toy blocks. For this reason, the meals all have identification stickers to tell them apart, but the stickers often come off. (And sometimes things just get labeled wrong.) I had rehydrated what I thought was beef teriyaki for dinner, but due to the blandness I was halfway through it before I realized my mistake. By then it was too late. I chucked the remnants in the trash compactor-

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