Modern Mysteries

I found a cool show on Netflix called the Inbestigators. It's an Australian kids show where fifth grade students run a detective agency. Maudie is the new girl at school; she's from England and has weird quirks in the pilot, such as crawling through windows. She solves the first case involving stolen bake sale money, and Ezra says they should start a detective agency and use his family's "granny flat" as the office. Ezra's friends Kyle and Ava also join, and the kids take turns recording stories of their cases for youtube. I like that the cast is fairly diverse and they have a variety of mysteries like Encyclopedia Brown. There's some modern stuff that worked well, such as a stolen drone and kids figuring out smartphone passwords due to sticky fingerprints. There's usually one or two red herring suspects, but Maudie usually solves the mysteries. Ezra still feels like the leader of the group since he provides the office and often tries to advertise the agency and buy spy gear for them. Ezra's younger sister Poppy appears a few times and is very cute. I hope the show continues.

Speaking of modern mysteries, I've read a few of the Aunty Lee mysteries set in Singapore. I don't always like the meandering way the author's plots flow, but I do like some of the characters in the books. Aunty Lee's Chilled Revenge is apparently based on a real life internet controversy about a British woman adopting a dog and then euthanizing it instead of returning it to the shelter; there was outrage from animal activists and "Justice for Tammy" slogans. The plot of the novel fictionalizes this incident and has the British woman return to Singapore to file a lawsuit against animal activists who criticized her. Aunty Lee's friend Commissioner Raja says that the death threats and doxxing of the "puppy killer" was going too far, but on the other hand, the British woman gets overly defensive and hysterical instead of just apologizing. It's an interesting take on modern internet culture, though I found some parts slow and repetitive to read, especially when I figured out the twist about the murder victim.