Swindle Case - Ben Slovak Sends out Invitations

Plot:

After Ben Slovak sends out invitations to all the sixth-graders in his school to a sleepover at the Haunted Rockford House, he finds himself there with his best friend Griffin and an empty house. While in the house, Griffin finds a baseball card in a drawer. When he reads it, he finds out it is an original rookie baseball card of Babe Ruth! So he stuffs it into his pocket and goes to sleep thinking about what he could do with the money from this very valuable card.

The next day, Ben and Griffin decided to sell the card. So they went to The Emporium to see how much they could get for the card. They presented the card to S. Wendell (a.k.a Swindle), owner of the store. He told them he would give them $120 for the card. To kids that is a lot of money, so they took it. When they got home, the boys saw Swindle on television auctioning the Babe Ruth card for a $1,000,000!!!!

When they got to school the next day, Griffin and Ben made some top-secret folders to give to kids with talent, to help them get the card back. The plan would involve getting past the guard dog and the high security system.

So that night, five people show up. Ben, Griffin, Savannah, Darren, and Pitch. They find an entrance on the roof. They make it into the building and start looking for the card. When they find the card they put it into a Smartpick (which is an invention of Griffins dad) to protect it. Unfortunately, they all are caught by the police and end up at the police station. It ends up they find the original owner of the baseball card in Colorado and the card gets shipped back to her. Finally, his dad picks up Griffin. Griffin is disappointed he did not get the money from the card, because he did not want to have to move away. The money would help them from having to sell their house.

As it turns out, with all the publicity from the baseball card, Griffins dads' invention (SmartPick) was going to be backed by investors. So they would not have to move away. In addition, because of all the bad publicity, The Emporium was going to shut down.

My Opinion of the Book:

My opinion of the book is that it was "pretty good". This book makes you think about standing up for yourself and to take responsibility for your actions. I could relate to this being a sixth-grader myself. So, when the kids went into Swindles house to get the baseball card back, it made me want to break into my brother's room and take back all my stuff that he had taken from me.