Kitty Hawk and the Hunt for Hemingway’s Ghost by Iain Reading
Genre: Adventure, Contemporary
Published by: Amazon
Pages: 298
Format: Paperback
Rating: ★★.5
Where to Find:  Goodreads | Amazon

Kitty Hawk is fast becoming a prominent character among my bookshelves. In the sequel, Kitty doesn’t fail to impress with another jam-packed adventure.

This time, Kitty is in Key West, Florida, with more focus on her plane as a water vessel than as an air ship. The adventurer-detective discovers a crime. Some people are looting the seas, stealing precious treasure for the sea floor. It’s safe to say Kitty does a lot of swimming! (Isn’t the cover beautiful?)

Just as before, there are pictures and maps to add to the reading experience. What are really love about the Kitty Hawk series is how immersed the reader can be. Iain Reading offers a few pages at the back of each novel for ‘Wider Reading (if you’re interested)’ which illustrates the research he did in order to make the mystery believable and able to be investigated in a search engine. The story telling is still prominent, allowing the reader a chance to piece the mystery together themselves, as they have the same information as Kitty.

As I have read three out of the four currently published Kitty Hawk books, I’m started to sense a pattern. Kitty travels to a new place. She gets friendly with the locals, who give her food and lodging. She managed to wrangle herself a date within the first week. She flies about in her plane. Someone tells a kind of long winded historical tale. Although I’ve enjoyed reading the Kitty Hawk books, and none of the outcomes are predictable, the time line of event certainly is.

Overall, I’d give this book 2.5 stars. I preferred how compact this mystery was, with Kitty just staying in the one place – it meant that the events could be built upon effectively to come to a clean conclusion. I look forward to reading the third book in the series, but hope for some more variation! The cover sure looks promising, let’s hope it delivers.