To start, in an alternate ending to the previous episode, Principal Krupp ends up in prison (“…a lot like being a student at Jerome Horwitz Elementary School, except that the prison had better funding”). Not that there aren’t pranks and envelope-pushing quips aplenty. Sure signs that the creative wells are running dry at last, the Captain’s ninth, overstuffed outing both recycles a villain (see Book 4) and offers trendy anti-bullying wish fulfillment. The chapters depicting powerful activity in the Big Lie and at the Museum aren’t fully integrated into the main plot-and the clunky Festival of Lies can’t hold a candle to the alluring tumult of the magical Museum. Goldie vows to fight anew for Jewel, where a war fomented by the duplicitous Fugleman is about to begin. By leveraging the Museum’s power and through their own wits, the children thwart their captors. When Goldie captures one of the Big Lies-a maelstrom-like force in which one’s spoken question is enacted like a wild dream-she connects with her mythical warrior alter-ego, Princess Frisia. Everything’s back to front and upside down, and masked people talk in opposites.

At times aided by two street urchins, Pounce and mute Mouse (whose dozen white mice play supporting roles), and accompanied by a mysterious cat and the Museum’s slaughterbird, Morg, Goldie tracks elusive villains during Spoke’s Festival of Lies. When Toadspit is likewise captured, it’s up to Goldie to find the siblings and bring them safely back to the city of Jewel. When Goldie and Toadspit witness the kidnapping of Toadspit's sister Bonnie, the two stow away in pursuit on a boat bound for the city of Spoke. The second title in Tanner’s Keepers Trilogy delivers a fantasy as thickly plotted as but less successful than Museum of Thieves (2010).

City of lies by lian tanner