Adventures of the Taylor Boys

This book consists of an introduction followed by ten short stories about the exploits of teenage brothers Ted and Johnny Taylor, amateur detectives who are students at Broughton High School in Raleigh, North Carolina. The time period is the late 1990s. Advised by their father, Charles Taylor, an attorney who was once a detective, the boys confront a wide variety of social problems and criminal activity and often assist local law enforcement officials with investigations. “Escape from the Winter Woods” deals with animal cruelty at a small circus; in “Riding the Train,” a gang initiation gone wrong propels the boys into rescuing a girl kidnapped from an orphanage; “The Game” describes the unmasking of a crooked baseball coach; arson and resentment toward migrant workers is the focus of “The Red Barn”; overcoming their initial antagonism, Ted and Lamont, leader of a group of black students at Broughton, join forces to fight drug dealers in “The Odd Couple” and promote racial reconciliation; escaped prisoners meet their match in a haunted house in “Green Acres”; an elderly German grocer in Raleigh is accused of being a former Nazi in “The Big, Ugly Lie”; a poor woman, fleeing with her young sons from an abusive former husband, is befriended by the Taylor boys and their energetic grandmother in “The Good Samaritans”; and the boys travel to the Lake County of England to confront spooky disturbances in “The Ghost House.” In all these situations, the kind-hearted but tough-thinking Taylor boys seek, in opposing what is wrong, to make the world a better place. The book contains no vulgarity or gratuitous violence but lots of intrigue. Illustrations by Pearl Skelton.