Camphor tells Freddy about an abandoned summer hotel and the unfriendly ghosts that live there, Freddy smells a rat-Simon the rat. Determined to find out just what his old enemy is up to, Freddy needs the perfect cover-up: camping! So Freddy packs up the sleeping bags, tents, and frying pans and heads out to the woods to expose Simon's scheme. But when the evil Mr. Eha starts skulking about, Freddy and his pals know that they'll have to do some serious detecting to get to the bottom of the mystery. ( )

Walter R. Brooks' "Freddy" series has been charming readers since the 1930s. Most agree that Brooks hit his stride in the 1940s. Set in upstate New York, the series follows the adventures of Freddy, a pig, and the other animals of the Bean farm. Freddy is a pig extraordinaire-- poet, newspaper editor, football player, and detective. In this outing, he goes undercover to again foil his nemesis, Herbert Garble.

These were among my favorite books when I was a child, and it was thanks to Knopf's practice of appending a colophon at the end of the books it published that I first began paying attention to type (Baskerville, in this case). I have been revisiting the Bean farm over the past couple of years. Brooks' gentle satire holds up well, and when reading them these days, I "hear" them mentally in Garrison Keillor's voice. ( )

While many of the books in the Freddy series could take place anywhere in the rural United States, some of them benefit more strongly from their upstate New York setting. This is one of them. The Adirondacks are a perfect place for a pig to go camping, especially when he's a detective going undercover. ( )