KDL Recommends

Feeling helpless to aid his frantic parents when his baby sister falls ill, Michael explores the dilapidated garage of his family’s new house, where he discovers a beast-like creature tucked away amid the spider webs and debris.
Lexile Level: 490

Thirteen-year-old Ellsworth leaves his father to visit the relatives he has never met and eventually joins forces with Jess, his distant cousin, to uncover family secrets and search for their ancestor’s hidden treasure.
Lexile Level: 660
Guided Reading Level: S

When Chris’s old bicycle disappears, he becomes convinced that magic is at work, so he and his friend, Muffin, set out to find the missing bike and prove to their skeptical parents that magic is real.
Lexile Level: 500

While learning to sail during a visit to his grandmother’s at the Connecticut shore, eleven-year-old Tony becomes excited about the rumors of sunken treasure in the area and starts following a couple who seem to be making a mysterious search for something.
Lexile Level: 540

When seemingly unrelated and strange events start to happen and a precious Vermeer painting disappears, eleven-year-olds Petra and Calder combine their talents to solve an international art scandal.
Lexile Level: 770
Guided Reading Level: S

Twelve-year-old Henry Coffin, the son of a private investigator, helps a gorgeous high school girl in her dangerous attempt to find her kidnapped mother.
Lexile Level: 610
Guided Reading Level: S

When someone steals the winner’s trophy for the school book project, Clarice emulates her favorite book heroine, Ruby Redfort the detective.
Lexile Level: 900
Guided Reading Level: U

When the Grace children go to stay at their Great Aunt Lucinda’s worn Victorian house, they discover a field guide to fairies and other creatures and begin to have some unusual experiences.
Lexile Level: 600
Guided Reading Level: Q

When Nore Robbins visits her new stepmother, brother, and sister in Louisiana, she is unnerved by the feeling of evil and eerie threats that pervades the plantation.
Lexile Level: 990
Guided Reading Level: NR

Thinking of people as animals — his mom as a canary, his dad as a basset hound, and his snotty math tutor as a Siamese cat — since he basically grew up in his parents’ pet shop, Aaron Betts finds life getting even stranger when the store begins losing business and pets begin mysteriously disappearing.
Lexile Level: 720
Guided Reading Level: R

When Marjan, a thirteen-year-old crippled girl, joins the Sultan’s harem in ancient Persia, she gathers for Shahrazad the stories which will save the queen’s life.
Lexile Level: 710
Guided Reading Level: NR

Minnie is full of money-making ideas that have not worked, but her detective agency plan seems to be successful when she gets two cases right away, one to find a cat’s owner, and the other to identify a thief who will steal anything.
Lexile Level: 440

Growing up in a reconstructed village that serves as a tourist site, Jessie is shocked when she learns that it is actually 1996 and not 1840, and a medical emergency among her peers prompts Jessie to seek help in a strange world.
Lexile Level: 730
Guided Reading Level: NR

When Matt and Parker learn the body they found in Indian Creek is a drug-related death, they fear Parker’s mother may be involved.
Lexile Level: 820
Guided Reading Level: X

After his older brother, a fledgling private detective, agrees to safeguard a package for a dwarf who does not live long, thirteen-year-old Nick scampers to solve the mystery while also trying to stay one step ahead of an assortment of thugs.
Lexile Level: 640
Guided Reading Level: P

When the Monroe family brings home a bunny they find in a movie theater while watching Dracula, Chester the cat and Harold the dog are suspicious of the new resident and believe him to be a vegetarian vampire when all the vegetables suddenly turn white.
Lexile Level: 700
Guided Reading Level: Q

Neither the return of Big Bob Till, Dragonfly’s report that his mother saw a ghost, nor a mysterious note warning that a cave is haunted will keep the gang from spending a night alone there.
Lexile Level: 1130
Guided Reading Level: NR

In this illustrated novel told through journal entries, news clippings, and letters, twelve-year-old Lily finds herself on the jury of a murder trial while conducting her own undercover investigation of the case.
Lexile Level: 850
Guided Reading Level: V

When he sees posters warning the local residents of the Indiana Aztec bats and hears the church bells play an unusual hymn over and over again, Bernie knows that something isn’t right and so gathers his friends to solve the mystery.
Lexile Level: 1040
Guided Reading Level: V

Gifts from Gwyn’s grandmother on his ninth birthday open up a whole new world to him, as he discovers he has magical powers that help him heal the breach with his father that has existed ever since his sister’s mysterious disappearance four years before.
Lexile Level: 810
Guided Reading Level: R

Cousins Debbie and Jeff stumble across something they were not meant to see when a blizzard strands them in a mysterious old house with a hidden mummy and Anubis, a strange creature that once guarded the pharaoh’s tomb.
Lexile Level: 780
Guided Reading Level: T

In 1913 in the Midwest a quartet of characters share adventures from exploding steamboats to “exorcizing” a ghost.
Lexile Level: 900
Guided Reading Level: V

Each of the sixteen people invited to the reading of a very strange will are given $10,000, a set of clues, and the chance to become a millionaire.
Lexile Level: 750
Guided Reading Level: V

Rob admits having seen a murder, but no one believes him — except the murderer.
Lexile Level: 770
Guided Reading Level: NR

Jai and his friends at a boarding school join forces with shape-shifters in their attempt to defeat the headmaster who steals the souls and futures of the students.
Lexile Level: 620
Guided Reading Level: NR

A collection of 158 mini-mysteries in which readers play Dr. Watson to master-detective Dr. Haledjian.
Lexile Level: 820
Guided Reading Level: S

Thirteen-year-old Sammy’s penchant for speaking her mind gets her in trouble when she involves herself in the investigation of a robbery at the “seedy” hotel across the street from the seniors’ building where she is living with her grandmother.
Lexile Level: 840
Guided Reading Level: T

Discovering an old-fashioned dollhouse in a dusty attic, Amy is unaware that the dollhouse holds a deadly, forgotten secret about a past murder, and the dolls decide that Amy must learn the truth.
Lexile Level: 670
Guided Reading Level: S

Matt Barber, a youngster with a reputation for telling tall tales and stretching the truth, cannot get anyone to believe that he has seen a ghost and that the school is haunted.
Lexile Level: 660
Guided Reading Level: P

When their father moves them for the seventh time in the five years since their mother’s death, Jenny and her younger sister hope to stay in this latest house and try to find out about the malevolent ghost who seems bent on getting revenge on their elderly neighbors.
Lexile Level: 660
Guided Reading Level: S

When their friend Tom is accused of murder, teenage sleuth P.C. Hawke and his partner Mackenzie attempt to clear their friend’s name by unraveling the circumstances surrounding the death of the museum’s chief biologist.
Lexile Level: 840
Guided Reading Level: NR