Not everyone would run toward the sound of a gunshot in a dark alley, but 10-year-old Izzie Feeney is not just anyone.
Izzie saw the fancy Miss Giddings heading into the alley with a tall man in a long overcoat, and she surely can't abandon the kind lady who not only regularly buys her newspapers, but leaves a tip. As Izzie dashes to the crime scene, she discovers that Miss Giddings is fine, but the dead man isn't. So begins Isabel Feeney, Star Reporter by Beth Fantaskey (Buzz Kill), an entertaining novel about a scrappy newsgirl in 1926 Chicago who wants more than anything to be a crime reporter like her idol, Maude Collier, who writes for the Chicago Tribune. (An author's note indicates that Maude is fictional, but based on the reporter Genevieve Forbes Herrick.) Little does Izzie know that her impulsive act will lead her straight to Maude Collier... and into Chicago's dangerous world of "diamond-studded gangsters" and "ruthless rumrunners."
If Miss Giddings didn't kill her boyfriend in that alley, who did? And was he really connected to bootlegger Al Capone? Izzie takes it upon herself to solve the murder so her benevolent friend doesn't linger on Murderess's Row. She ropes Miss Gidding's polio-stricken son into her detective work, and the murdered mobster's daughter, wanting revenge, gets into the act as well. Izzie is an endearing latchkey kid: blunt, unwittingly funny and doggedly determined. Readers will cheer her on as she fights for the truth and for her newfound friends. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness