It Happened on a Train (Brixton Brothers Series #3)

by Mac Barnett Narrated by Arte Johnson

Overview

Retired private detective and current seventh grader Steve Brixton has a new career: taking out the garbage on Wednesdays for five bucks a week. But it's hard to leave the old game behind, and on a train trip down the California coast, Steve finds himself pulled back into sleuthing. Soon he's in over his head in four feet and eleven inches of mystery involving a fleet of priceless automobiles, a deadly assassin (or maybe just a faulty lock on a sauna door), and a secret train car filled with intrigue. Plus there's a girl involved, which complicates everything. I mean she's just Steve's friend. And really, they barely even know each other. It's not like they're boyfriend or girlfriend or anything, okay?


From the Compact Disc edition.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"Barnett’s sly and often silly Hardy Boy parody chugs along with plenty of laughs and enough honest-to-gosh mystery to please any lover of boy detective fiction. Rex’s black-and-white pencils (which also parody the Hardy tales) are still a fine match for the goofiness. Mention of the next adventure at mystery’s close will make Brixton fans smile."—Kirkus Reviews

"An amusing addition to the Brixton Brothers series."—Booklist

School Library Journal - Audio

Gr 4–6—Twelve-year-old Steve Brixton is a private investigator—and retired. After learning The Ghost Writer Secret, Mac Barnett's second title (2011) in the series, Steve has become disillusioned with his investigator role models and is determined to leave the world of sleuthing behind. However, Steve's reputation as a successful PI draws him back into a compelling mystery in It Happened on a Train (2011, both S & S), and he embarks on a dangerous train trip with his chum, Dana, and Claire, an interesting young lady. They confront baddies and evil intentions—and discover an interesting twist in a string of expensive car thefts. Arte Johnson provides a natural voice for Steve's engaging, often comical story. The wry, textured narration conveys the tale's tongue-in-check but serious undertones. While listeners may occasionally miss the rise and fall of a chapter or the shift of a scene that the visual text provides, they will quickly be drawn into the plot and find themselves pulling for Steve to escape the latest threat. An engaging listen.—Janie Pickett, Lackland ISD, San Antonio, TX

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172162152
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	10/11/2011
Series:	Brixton Brothers Series , #3
Edition description:	Unabridged
Age Range:	8 - 11 Years

Read an Excerpt

It Happened on a Train
THE END
IT WAS WEDNESDAY EVENING, a.k.a. trash night. Steve Brixton, seventh grader, formerly of the Brixton Brothers Detective Agency, plodded along his driveway, dragging a maroon bin behind him. The bin’s wheels rumbled and popped as they rolled over pebbles on the blacktop. This week the Brixton family’s bin was very full. The lid would not close tightly; it bounced up and down, making an irregular, slow clapping sound. And the trash was heavy—Steve could feel the can’s weight in his elbow, and he kept switching the arm he used to drag it: right, then left, and back again. He sighed. Tonight was a particularly difficult trash night, and that’s because the garbage bin contained fifty-nine shiny, red-backed books: a complete set of the Bailey Brothers Mysteries, a series of detective novels that until a week and a half ago had been Steve’s favorite books of all time.

Steve pulled the bin down off the curb. It hit the street hard, and its lid bounced open like a clam’s shell, revealing the can’s contents. Steve stood underneath a streetlamp. Its orange bulb flickered and hummed, even though the sun was just now setting and there was still plenty of light in the sky.

There they were, neatly stacked in a cardboard box atop a week’s worth of kitchen scraps and dental floss: Bailey Brothers #1 to #58, and of course The Bailey Brothers’ Detective Handbook, which was jam-packed with Shawn and Kevin Bailey’s Real Crime-Solving Tips and Tricks. (Shawn and Kevin Bailey, as pretty much everybody knows, were the sons of world-famous detective Harris Bailey and the heroes of the Bailey Brothers books—they had their own crime lab and fixed their own cars and were basically the acest sleuths around.) The handbook had chapters full of things every serious gumshoe would need to know: stuff like “Tailing Baddies,” “Making Your Own Blowgun,” and “Modus Operandi, Portrait Parlé, and Other Funny Foreign Phrases for the American Sleuth.”

Steve stood and stared at his books. He looked around. Identical maroon bins stood like sentries outside every home on the street. The neighborhood was quiet. Assured that he was alone, Steve reached out and picked up a book: Bailey Brothers #15: The Phantom of Liar’s Bluff, which started like this:

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