Joe's, Duke, and Connecticut) leading up to the national championship game.

Stevie and Susan Carol's fathers make the trip, too, but the kids will mostly be on their own as they follow the Final Four teams (Minnesota State, St. Their submissions for the youth writing contest were easily best of the bunch, and now they meet in New Orleans, Louisiana for the grand prize: the privilege of covering the 2005 Final Four as cub reporters, taken under the wing of seasoned journalists Dick Weiss and Bill Brill, who know how things work at the highest level of reportage. Their secret probe into alleged fraud at the NCAA Final Four could put more than the tournament's integrity on the line when they run up against hardened criminals with millions of dollars at stake, but it's up to the two of them to think their way out of potentially lethal predicaments when they arise.įor college basketball fanatics like Stevie and Susan Carol, winning a trip to the Final Four is a fantasy brought into reality. It would be easy for the sleuthing of these two eighth graders to violate the perimeters of plausibility, but John Feinstein doesn't take those shortcuts and hope his young readers won't know the difference every lead that Stevie and Susan Carol follow is legitimately earned and has to be conceivable for a pair of thirteen-year-olds to dig up using only their own wits as they investigate a story that could blow big-time college sports apart. He writes intriguing, flavorful characters, not settling for paper dolls to inhabit the clever mystery he's created Stevie Thomas and Susan Carol Anderson are realistic kids with genuine motivations, who require time to warm up to each other before they can effectively coalesce to take on corruption among the elite in an organization as powerful as the National Collegiate Athletic Association. He knows how to structure a mystery with plot twists guaranteed to keep readers off balance.

The storytelling talents of John Feinstein, author of 1986's classic sports memoir A Season on the Brink: A Year with Bob Knight and the Indiana Hoosiers, translate well for the youth set.

Last Shot by John Feinstein