The Royce Agency

by Pa Rock
Reader 

I have just finished reading a well-written novel by a young man in Oregon - a thirteen-year-old first-time author by the name of Sebastian Files. 

Mr. Files' book, The Royce Agency, focuses on a millionaire entrepreneur named Charles Royce.   He owns and operates the "Phoenix Dealership," a business that he started and built into a success by himself. The Phoenix Dealership is not like a normal car agency whose purpose is just to sell cars.   Instead it designs new cars, manufactures and tests them, and sells the new cars to the public.  The Phoenix Dealership performs the repairs on the cars that it sells.  Charles manages the company himself, and he also designs and test drives many of the cars.

Charles lives in a nice home in a good part of town along with his pretty wife, Alice.  They lead a fairly uneventful life until one day when Charles begins encountering strangers who seem to be following or watching him - and he starts to hear news reports indicating that criminals may be in the area.  At about that time Charles meets one of the strangers, a man named Grindle Wrangler, who informs Charles that he is about to come into a strange inheritance.

Grindle tells Charles that the time has come for him to take the reins of another family business - the Royce Agency - a large, secretive crime-fighting organization that had been founded by Charles' forebears several generations earlier.  Charles had never even heard of the Royce Agency, and now he was expected to take charge and direct the agency in its crime-fighting mission.

Charles Royce's life was getting complicated!

One of my favorite scenes in this book is when Charles and Grindle chase a bad guy into the city's sewer system.  They encounter several surprises as they races through the underground tunnels and finally lunge through a door that leads to a harrowing . . . well, let's just say that the sewer adventure has a surprising conclusion!  During the chase through the sewer, I was reminded of my favorite fictional detectives - Fenton Hardy's son's, Frank and Joe.  Those Hardy boys got in all kinds of scrapes and wound up in some really strange places - though never a sewer system that I can remember.  That was a very original setting.

Young Mr. Files did a nice job with his book.  It included 125 pages of story text divided into eight chapters, along with various acknowledgments, notes, and even a section of tips on writing.  It is available from Amazon.com both as a Kindle edition and in paperback.  And - there are reports that he plans to extend this initial volume into a series!

Watch out, Frank and Joe, Sebastian Files is fixing to crowd you off of the library bookshelves!

(Nice work, Sebastian.  Your grandfather is impressed and proud of you!)