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

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.