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Book Review: Kitty Hawk and the Tragedy of the RMS Titanic by Iain Reading

Kitty Hawk and the Tragedy of the RMS Titanic is the fourth book in the Kitty Hawk Flying Detective Agency series by Iain Reading. This is a series that you do need to read in order, and one that I highly recommend for mature middle grade readers, young adults, and adults.

The Kitty Hawk Flying Detective Agency Series follows intrepid teenage seaplane pilot Kitty Hawk and her various adventures of mystery and intrigue as she follows in the footsteps of Amelia Earhart on an epic flight around the world. This fourth book in the series brings Kitty to the emerald hills of Ireland where she meets a handsome stranger and is quickly caught up in a hundred-year-old family treasure hunt involving secret codes and puzzling clues that lead her on a fast-paced adventure that carries her from Dublin to London until she finally unlocks the mystery and discovers the long-hidden treasure. Much like the earlier books in this series, has some high action and plenty of mystery and history.

Kitty Hawk and the Tragedy of the RMS Titanic opens with a few good laughs and quickly mores into the mystery. Here Kitty is introduced to the mysteries and questions surrounding (as you might have guessed from the title) the Titanic. There are some great tidbits of history that really came to life for me as I read, and I enjoyed the decoding of messages and clue following. I did not feel as connected to the secondary characters as I have in previous books, almost like a couple of them came in too fast to really get the normal fleshing out and personalization that I expected. The historical information and locations were very well integrated in the story and set me with the wanderlust and desire to do more research just as the previous books did. I would love the chance to travel the world as freely as Kitty, although I do not need to get myself into dangerous situations, although solving a few mysteries along the way would be fine with me.

Kitty Hawk and the Tragedy of the RMS Titanic did not grip me as much as the previous three books, but I will admit to having extremely high expectations because of how great the other books were, and I was coming of a serious reading slump. With that in mind, I still think it was an excellent book with Google-able locations and documents that made the read very interactive. The combination of danger, high action, and several layers of mystery and puzzles to solve was perfectly balanced and left me looking forward to seeing more about Miss Kitty Hawk.

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