Ridley Pearson. Steel Trapp: The Challenge. New York: Disney, 2008. Print.

This is the first in at least three books featuring fourteen-year-old Stephen “Steel” Trapp. His name is appropriate not because he is strong, but because he has a photographic memory. In other words, he has a mind like a steel trap.

Steel is on his way to a national science fair from Chicago to Washington DC when he sees a woman on the train platform leave a briefcase and forget to pick it up. It becomes clear, though, that she does not want to pick it up, but that it is a “drop” of some kind.

By the time he tracks down the man on the train who picked up the briefcase and the briefcase itself, Steel has attracted the attention of a couple of U.S. Marshals as well as the apparent bad guys who are using what is in the briefcase for some questionable purpose.

While on the train, he meets Kaileigh who was on her way to the science fair, but someone stole her project. Mystery, crime—it is a real pot boiler. Steel is clever in figuring out puzzles, but perhaps not really thinking ahead about the consequences of some of his actions.

Yes, Steel Trapp: The Challenge is an action-packed young adult book. Chapters average about four pages, and they keep the pace for nearly the whole book. This might attract readers who like action and might be reluctant to read other types of fiction. A photographic memory is about the closest a human being in this world can get to having a superpower, but how is that used? A little more realistic than (fill in the blank)-man comics, but it has some of the same sense of adventure and responsibility.