The Curse of the Bully’s Wrath: A Mickey Rangel Mystery/ La maldición de la ira del abusón: Colección Mickey Rangel, detective privado

By René Saldaña Jr.

• ISBN: 978-1-55885-866-4
• Publication Date: May 31, 2018
• Bind: Trade Paperback
• Pages: 64 pages

Fifth-grade detective Mickey Rangel is back on the case in this short, bilingual novel about what drives bullies.

Marco, the new boy in school, is small and “mean as a skunk.” He has no fear. Mickey knows, because he saw the incident with Simón Ortega, a football player who’s a head and a half taller than Marco. The short boy is sly too—even though he started the fight, it’s Simón who ends up in the principal’s office, in trouble for beating up a smaller kid!

Mickey plans to do the right thing and tell the principal what he saw, but the next day Marco threatens him and everyone else if they tell. Because of him, Simón has in-school suspension for two weeks and is off the football team. “Imagine what I can do to you if you stick your fat noses into my business.”

Unable to understand why Marco is so mean, Mickey is even more dumbfounded when Bucho, the school’s resident bully, backs down from the new, short kid. What drives a bully? Mickey wonders. Thus his newest challenge: to turn a bully into a friend, or at the very least, a nicer person. Mickey Rangel, kid detective extraordinaire, is on the case!

In the fifth novel of the Mickey Rangel Mystery series, author and educator René Saldaña, Jr. crafts another entertaining book for intermediate readers about something every school kid can relate to: mean classmates who knock others down to feel better about themselves.

“In Mickey Rangel’s fifth mystery, like many kids his age, the title character is faced with a new kid in class who is less than welcoming. But how do you help someone who doesn’t want to change? It’s a solid resource for younger kids to learn about how best to tackle a bully and how to find your voice and speak up for not only yourself, but those around you. A welcome return to Mickey’s primarily Latinx world.”—Kirkus Reviews

RENÉ SALDAÑA, JR. is the author of four books in the Mickey Rangel Mystery series: A Mystery Bigger than Big / Un misterio más grande que grandísimo (Piñata Books, 2016), The Mystery of the Mischievous Marker / El misterio del malvado marcador (Piñata Books, 2013), The Lemon Tree Caper / La intriga del limonero (Piñata Books, 2011) and The Case of the Pen Gone Missing / El caso de la pluma perdida (Piñata Books, 2009). His books for teens include A Good Long Way (Piñata Books, 2010), The Whole Sky Full of Stars (Random House, 2007) and The Jumping Tree (Delacorte, 2001). He lives in Lubbock, Texas, where he teaches in the College of Education at Texas Tech University.