All Ears (FunJungle) - Softcover

Gibbs, Stuart

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1665956496 ISBN 13: 9781665956499

Verlag: S&S Books for Young Readers, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

In the ninth novel in New York Times bestselling author Stuart Gibbs’s FunJungle series, resident sleuth Teddy Fitzroy is on the case to find a missing elephant and clear his friend of vandalism.

When a herd of elephants interrupts the big Friday night football game, the police enlist Teddy and his father to assist them in getting the animals safely back home to the elephant sanctuary. Only when they arrive, their owners realize one of the elephants has gone missing! The lone African elephant, Tanzy, is still out there somewhere.

Then Teddy’s best friend, Xavier, is accused of vandalizing a bulldozer in protest of a builder ruining a beloved piece of land they call TurtleTown. Teddy is torn. His best friend needs him but so does Tanzy. Can Teddy crack both cases before someone gets hurt?

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1: Weirdest Crime Ever 1 WEIRDEST CRIME EVER
I was on the scene when the elephant vanished, because I’d been hired to catch a urine thief.

I realize that “detective” is an unusual job for an eighth grader. The other kids at my middle school did chores for their parents or mowed lawns for their neighbors. I solved mysteries. I hadn’t really chosen to do this; it just sort of happened. I was in the right place at the right time to crack a few cases, and word got out that I had a knack for it.

So when the Common Scents Company called me up and offered to pay me to solve a crime, I was intrigued. Up until that point, I’d been helping everyone for free. Making money to do it sounded much better—and far less sweaty than mowing lawns.

Although the crime turned out to be absolutely bizarre.

“How much do you know about the deer urine business, Teddy?” asked Tessa Claymore.

“Er… nothing,” I admitted.

It was a Friday evening in late September, and we were in Tessa’s pickup truck, jouncing along one of the dusty four-wheel-drive roads on her ranch. Like much of the Texas Hill Country, her land was covered by a scrubby forest of live oak and cedar trees, with the occasional grassy clearing or patch of prickly pear cactus. From the road, it had looked like a typical cattle ranch, although it now occurred to me that I hadn’t seen any cattle.

Tessa’s pickup was brand new. It smelled fresh and clean inside, and there were only 216 miles on the odometer.

Tessa was about my parents’ age, dressed in standard ranching garb: boots, jeans, button-down shirt, and cowboy hat. She had the dark tan of someone who spent a lot of time outdoors, and her long black hair was woven into a braid that ran down her back.

“How about you?” Tessa asked my father. Dad was along for the ride; he had driven me to the ranch as soon as I got home from soccer practice after school. I could have ridden my bike there, but it was old and only had one working gear. It would have taken me half an hour each way, and it was already getting late. The roads in the Hill Country weren’t safe after dark; they were narrow and windy, and people often drove way too fast on them. I had offered to visit the ranch the next morning, but Tessa wanted me to get started right away, so Dad had brought me.

“I’ve used urine on occasion,” Dad said.

“You’re a hunter?” Tessa asked.

“Wildlife photographer,” Dad corrected.

I suddenly realized what they were talking about. “People use the urine to lure deer?”

“And to conceal their own scent,” Tessa added. “We make a variety of products here to aid hunters in their pursuit of game.” She looked to Dad again. “Although I never considered the wildlife photographer market before.”

“It’s probably a lot smaller than the hunter market,” Dad told her. “And since I’m always working in new places, I usually make my own scents. I’m not sure that an African antelope would be attracted to urine from a Texan deer.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Tessa said. “You ought to try my Hot Mama Doe Lure next time you go on assignment. I promise you, if there’s a male with hooves close enough to smell it, he’ll come running.”

She steered around a stand of trees, and what I assumed to be the urine collection facility came into view: a large white barn that looked almost as new as Tessa’s truck. It was built into the slope of a low hill so that the end closest to us was six feet above the ground and rested on a series of struts.

Both sides of the barn were flanked by several fenced-in paddocks, each of which held dozens of white-tailed deer.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Tessa asked. She parked her truck right beside the barn and hopped out.

Dad and I did too. The moment we exited the air-conditioned cab, we were walloped by the heat.

Central Texas had suffered through a brutally hot August, and to everyone’s dismay, September was even worse. The heat had been relentless. Even though it was close to sunset, it was still ninety degrees—and the extreme humidity made it seem closer to a hundred.

I immediately felt extra thankful that my father had driven me to Tessa’s ranch. Soccer practice had been bad enough; cycling along baking asphalt roads on such a sweltering day would have been agony.

Several large air conditioners beside the barn were humming at full blast.

“Are we going inside?” I asked hopefully.

“Sure thing.” Tessa took a key ring from her pocket and led us toward the door. “If you’re gonna help me, you need to understand how the urine business works.”

Dad had recognized how new the building was too, because he said, “Looks like this is a relatively young business.”

“Yes and no,” Tessa replied. “My husband’s family has been raising cattle here for generations, but that line of work isn’t what it used to be. Meanwhile, we’d heard the urine business was lucrative. So a few years back, we decided to experiment with it. We built some pens, then got some deer and a few portable collection units.” She pointed down the hill to several specialized sheds. They all were about four feet on each side and built on wheels so that they could be moved around.

“Are those Porta-Potties for deer?” I asked.

“That’s right. It’s pretty labor intensive to lure the deer in there one by one, but they paid off enough to make us realize urine was the future. So we built this facility last year.” Tessa unlocked the barn and led us in.

On the inside, it didn’t look much like a barn at all.

To begin with, it was clean. Every barn I had ever been in was filthy, which made sense, given that animals lived in them. The dirt floors were always littered with hay, and, more often than not, the animals had relieved themselves inside. Therefore, barns usually smelled.

But this building wasn’t merely clean; it was practically sterile.

It was a big, empty space with white walls and a white ceiling. There was a steel grating instead of a floor. And even though several dozen female deer were inside, the whole place smelled like antiseptic.

It was cooler than it had been outside, but still not quite as cold as I’d hoped. The space was too big and open. It appeared that the job of the air conditioners was to keep the deer inside from being cooked alive, rather than making the place bearable for humans.

“We rotate our does through here during the day,” Tessa explained proudly. “When they go to the bathroom, everything drops through the grating into a system I designed myself. There’s a few layers of mesh below us that filter out the feces, and then the pure, unadulterated urine flows into the collection unit.”

The deer looked extremely out of place in the industrial setting, but they seemed surprisingly content. One of them casually urinated right in front of us, as though it wanted to help demonstrate how the system worked.

I considered the entire facility. It looked like it had been expensive to build. “Exactly how lucrative is this business?”

Tessa grinned. “A...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: S&S Books for Young Readers
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1665956496
• ISBN 13: 9781665956499
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar