In Trouble with Turtles

At the family summer cottage in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, trouble comes to twelve-year-old Jerry as he follows his passion to draw and study wildlife, particularly turtles. A large snapping turtle that he and his seven-year-old sister Mimi encounter one morning, and Jerry’s anxious boat trip with turtle shooters, eventually lead the two siblings to a dangerous encounter in the forest. Here they become involved with Holt Johnson, a biologist, who begins to take Jerry with him as a helper for his field work on turtles. After Holt and the children’s widowed mother become friends, Jerry is allowed to go with Holt to the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica to help the biologist with his research on marine turtles. There, in the small village of Tortuguero, Jerry—never shy—engineers for himself a risky situation to catch turtle-egg poachers. And later, after his mother and Mimi arrive, Jerry and Mimi and local boy, Alberto, put themselves in the middle of a more hazardous situation as they try to find the perpetrators of a local crime involving illegal turtle hunting.