Goldie Vance

Besides parking cars at a chichi hotel in 1950s Florida, biracial Goldie Vance aspires to be a detective, assisting Walter, the hotel investigator, with finding missing children and pilfered items. When Ludwig, a German hotel guest, loses a necklace, Goldie easily finds it, but it's not nearly as valuable as he made it sound, and come time to return it, they can't find him. What Goldie does find is a Russian candy wrapper in Ludwig's car and a suspicious blonde busily distracting Walter from the task at hand. Larson's retro mystery weaves car chases, drag races, Cold War espionage, light romance, and brainy deductive reasoning throughout this slick series starter, and plucky Goldie is a fantastic protagonist. Williams and Stern's candy-colored artwork makes great use of mid-century design and cantilevered angles, and their characters present a refreshingly wide array of body types and skin tones. Though the ending is a little neat, readers will likely be too charmed by Goldie and the groundwork for more mysteries to come to notice.--Hunter, Sarah Copyright 2016 Booklist