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Seven-year old amateur detective Suzanne Collier lives with her mother, father, and baby sister. Her quest to solve mysteries often lacks social grace as she constantly asks questions, driving adults and her classmates crazy in the process. Still she solves three major mysteries: one in her home town revealing the criminal activities of her friend's nanny and the nanny's criminal son; a second case in Michigan during her summer vacation that helps catch robbers; and a final case while she's staying with her grandmother in Kansas that exposes an archeologist who tries to pass off a fake dinosaur find.
Paula Diggs' use of a first person stream of consciousness narrative pulls readers into Suzanne's world. Listening to her, readers feel what the adults in Suzanne's life feel. They too wish that she'll calm down. As the novel progresses, though, readers begin to listen to Suzanne as they realize that, annoying as she may be, her intuition is usually right and the clues she finds lead to breaks in cases.
Suzanne becomes more tolerable as the novel progresses. The fact that the novel is broken into three parts helps. After the first part, readers can breathe a sigh of relief, much as adults do when Suzanne leaves, before starting Part II. Now that they are acquainted with Suzanne, readers know what to expect and know to pay attention to her when she finds a clue. There's more to it than that, however. The novel takes Suzanne on a journey in which she has to deal with change, grow, and find herself. In each section, she becomes a little more mature. People give her credit. Even so, her journey is not over as she still has one big mystery to solve, that of her own identity.