The Shrine of the Breathing Breath — Thomas Wylde

Ten-year-old Trevor Blake is a level-headed kid who works as an adviser to a reality-challenged wizard in 1950s Los Angeles. (He's the infamous Exploding Wizard of West Altadena; see Book One: The Exploding Wizard's Right-Hand Boy.) Trevor's fifth-grade Christmas vacation is about to get very busy. There's Shurlee Dimple, the all-singing, all-dancing, all cutie-pie child actress starring in her first big motion picture. The premiere's going to be at Grauman's Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. (Just a couple of blocks from Trevor's house, as it happens.) Turns out Dimple is actually a forty-year-old witch. Not that she's trying to hide anything. Trevor's going to be riding in the wizard's new advertising blimp, circling the premiere. He just has to get through a three-week flight school in four days. (He can probably pull it off; they don't call him The Brain for nothing.) His fellow pupils are all contract zombies looking for a new career. (Zombies definitely have the patience to fly blimps across the big city.) All this happens because the monkey pilots are on strike. Shurlee Dimple's house burns to the ground under mysterious circumstances. She's missing, but that's not the weird part. After a bulldozer levels the wreckage, Trevor finds a phone cable coming up out of the ground right where her house used to sit. His best friend Jackson is obsessed with what he hears on that line. Can he figure out where the missing actress is in time for the movie's premiere? The cops are looking at the Wizard as their prime suspect. Trevor tries to hold the whole operation together. Be nice if he could do it without losing his best friend in the process. The Shrine of the Breathing Breath is a middle-grade chapter book of 27k words. Like the first Trevor Blake Adventure, it's also suitable for whimsical adults.