Sixth grade is turning out to be the trickiest year ever for Bennet, Pete, and Elizabeth. Bennet and Pete are best friends, Bennet and Elizabeth hate each other, and Pete has a huge crush on Elizabeth. Got that? Things are even more complicated because the kids have similar interests that put them in competition with each other, whether they like it or not. Bennet and Pete run their own news website called Deep Doo-Doo, and Elizabeth is the editor-in-chief of the school newspaper, The Purple Patch.

So when somebody climbs up the flagpole in front of the Town Hall and sticks a pumpkin on top of it, Bennet and Pete post the story on Deep Doo-Doo immediately --- but Elizabeth scoops them with a news flash from The Purple Patch. When Bennet cleverly scoops Elizabeth's scoop, he makes her seriously furious. They fight a war of whispers in social studies class, which gets some unwelcome attention from their teacher. He decides that a fitting punishment is to make them partners on their Civil War project. He says they have to work together to solve the Great Pumpkin Caper. What's that got to do with the Civil War? When Bennet and Elizabeth try to work together on anything, it's a civil war!

Well, with their teacher cracking the whip, plus a $500 reward offered by the town's newspaper to anybody who can find out who planted that pumpkin, Bennet, Pete, and Elizabeth start solving the mystery as a team. Pete, of course, is in seventh heaven around Elizabeth. Bennet has to grudgingly admire her detective skills. And she's a terrific reporter.

As they begin to gather all the facts and come up with some suspects, they get a little help from some mysterious e-mails sent to Deep Doo-Doo. At first the e-mails just seem like bad poetry, and they don't even make any sense. Until Elizabeth cracks their code and the kids realize that the poems are clues to the pumpkin mystery! When the kids narrow down the suspects and interview the top person on their list, they get into some really deep doo-doo. They find out that new mysteries mixed together with old ones can send folks off the edge. What will Bennet, Elizabeth and Pete do when they discover the secret of the pumpkin on the flagpole? And will they all end up friends? Find out in this fun whodunit.

--- Reviewed by Tamara Penny