The Best Books About Law and Crime for Kids

Stanley Yelnats is sentenced to a desert camp for stealing a pair of sneakers he never touched, and every hole he digs turns out to be part of a much older crime.

A wolf phones in his account of the three little pigs from behind bars: it was a sneeze, a cup of sugar, and a terrible misunderstanding.

Officer Buckle’s safety speeches put every school assembly to sleep — until his police dog Gloria starts performing the tips behind his back.

Mr. Wolf, Mr. Snake, Mr. Piranha, and Mr. Shark are done being feared. They are starting a club, doing good deeds, and being extremely bad at it.

Cheated out of a Babe Ruth card worth a fortune, Griffin Bing assembles a crew of sixth graders to steal it back from a collector’s guarded shop.

A very small fish steals a hat from a very large fish and explains, with total confidence, why he is going to get away with it.

Idaville’s police chief brings his hardest cases home to the dinner table, where his ten-year-old son solves them for a quarter a day.

In 1935, Moose Flanagan moves to Alcatraz Island, where his father works the cell house, the warden’s daughter runs a scheme, and Al Capone does the laundry.

Thirteen-year-old Theodore Boone knows every judge and clerk in town — and then learns something that could decide the outcome of a murder trial.

Sixteen heirs are summoned to hear a will that accuses one of them of murder, then sends them all hunting for the answer in pairs.

In 1911 a handyman walked out of the Louvre with the Mona Lisa under his smock — and accidentally made her the most famous painting on earth.

Bass Reeves escaped slavery, learned the Indian Territory better than anyone alive, and arrested more than three thousand outlaws as a deputy U.S. marshal.

Victor Lustig sold the Eiffel Tower for scrap metal. Then, when nobody reported it, he came back and sold it again.

A swaggering highwayman robs every traveler on the road of their snacks, until a very clever duck sends him somewhere he cannot steal anything at all.

Zoe’s twelfth birthday brings a letter from the father she has never met — the one in prison for murder, who says he did not do it.