Sabotage At Casa Grande Springs by DD Sterner

This middle grade mystery-adventure hearkens back to the Famous Five and similar novels I devoured as a kid, tho with one crucial difference I’ll talk about later in this review.

Thirteen year-old twins Brice and Brianna Hendrix have recently moved to Florida, and are spending the summer helping their mom by volunteering at the retirement center where she works. Casa Grande Springs also happens to be where their grandfather Mr Opa lives with Weaver, the half Saint Bernard, half Labrador who’s as much the twins’ dog as his own.

The twins are thrilled that their best friend Daniel Gonzalez has joined them in volunteering there, too. All three of them expect a pretty cushy gig where they’ll get to fish in the pond, explore the woods and practice their archery in their copious down time.

Unfortunately for the young teens, a series of weird events keeps cutting into their plans for leisure. While the wild animals getting loose on the premises might just be the unfortunate result of someone leaving a door open to the local and varied Everglades wildlife — necessitating that the kids spend a lot more time on clean-up than they’d anticipated — there’s no innocuous explanation for the collapse of a recently constructed porch roof. Someone is deliberately sabotaging the retirement home, but why?

The best friends don’t call themselves the Private Investigators Squad for nothing. Determined to get to the bottom of things, they and Weaver embark on an investigation into who would want Casa Grande Springs to close and why. But with vicious animals lurking in the swamp and even more dangerous humans willing to do anything to further their own deadly plans, will the PI Squad be able to solve the case, bring the perpetrators to justice, and perhaps even save a life in the process?

Sometimes, reading as an adult the books I loved as a kid, I’m appalled at how badly they hold up versus the burnished memories I have of them in my head. I’m sure that, had I read this book as a youngster, I’d be a lot less critical of what’s ultimately a decently entertaining and, frankly, more educational then expected middle-grade novel. The bits about the Everglades and the importance of care centers at the end are excellent additions to a book set in both.

I have to admit, tho, that the editing — or lack thereof — on this title grated on my nerves. This would be fine were this self-published. I’d still mention the lack of editing, but I wouldn’t be quite so irritated. And here’s the thing: I’m not nitpicky. I’ve long accepted that typos and other accidents happen. But it really felt to me as if this book came right from an author’s keyboard to my screen, and that neither the book nor my reading experience were the better for it. I can’t speculate as to why, but I do feel that this book was far more scattered than it needed to be, and required a firmer editorial hand to make it feel not only more plausible but also more impactful for its focus. I think DD Sterner has a lot of potential as an author, but I also think this book would have benefited from a ton of cuts and guided rewrites. That said, I’m also considering this from the point of view of an adult reader. Maybe younger readers would be more forgiving, as I once was of classics that are just unreadable to me now (see: L’Engle’s A Wrinkle In Time, Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising sequence, even some Encyclopedia Brown stories — all beloved by me as a child, and all hastily reshelved by me as an adult.)

Anyway, you could do worse than to hand this book to your youngster to read. It’s educational and not unpleasant, and if it strains any credulity, well, what kid doesn’t want to be the big darn hero from time to time? Sabotage At Casa Grande Springs isn’t aiming to be great literature, and that’s perfectly okay.

Sabotage At Casa Grande Springs by DD Sterner was published February 20 2025 by Crimson Dragon Publishing and is available from all good booksellers, including