Panda Chase

When a truck tips over en route to the zoo and giant panda Pingwu makes a break for it, the Mission Fox team is on the case. Justin D'Ath keeps the action moving at a pace that rewards newly independent readers who aren't quite ready for longer chapter books, and the animal-rescue premise does exactly what it needs to do — it gets kids rooting for the outcome from page one. A quarry scene raises the stakes in an age-appropriate way. The honest caveat is that at just 57 pages, character development takes a back seat to plot, and critical coverage outside Australian school-market channels is thin, so it's harder to gauge how it stacks up broadly. A solid, clean adventure pick for the six-to-nine set.