Neptune King and the Counterfeiters

Neptune King and the Counterfeiters is the 16th book in the series. K&J are hired to find a counterfeiting ring, but they are not too optimistic about their chance of success, seeing as how the treasury department’s investigators have been working on the case for several months without success. Being a lazy day at work, Shark heads off to run some errands and Neptune decides to take a nap as he’s been missing out on sleep at home due Max’s—his son’s crying overnight. He falls into a deep sleep and dreams about the future: of a time when he and Shark’s children are teenagers mixing in real happenings of the day into his dream to create a vivid story. In the first dream, Shark’s sons Link and his brother Leo accidentally get involved with counterfeiters. Link, a chip of the old block gets caught by them and abducted while protecting his younger brother. Shark and Leo then set out to trace them and are led to the counterfeiter’s headquarters, where Shark rescues his son while the police and the treasury department’s investigators round up the crooks. In the second dream, Neptune’s daughter Katrina witnesses a murder during a fox hunt. She’s an animal activist and was there to save the fox and ruin the chances of the hunters catching it. She enlists Link Johnson help and he sneaks out of home in the early hours to travel with her out to the country estate of Lady Isabelle bunting-Brown. There they leave false scents to confuse the hounds. The hide up in a tree to watch the hunt, amused to see the dog’s confusion and the fox getting away. Unfortunately they also get more than they bargained for when the witness a woman knocked deliberately from her horse and her attacker clobbering her with a rock. Terrified they flee, not realizing they’ve left behind a labelled drink bottle. Rachel and Neptune show up looking for the children and the killer learns about the possibility of them having been in the vicinity while he committed his crime. Rachel and Neptune find the children and return home with them, while Katrina and Link stay quiet about what they saw, thinking that the police would soon realize that murder had been done. The killer tracks them down, planning to silence them but little does he realize he is not dealing with ordinary children. These kids know how to look after themselves, so when he comes up against Katrina, Max and Link, he doesn’t stand a chance. In the third dream, Neptune is concerned about his son’s behaviour when Max has a friend stay over and ends up fighting with him. When he tries to find out what the fight was about his son tells him to mind his own business. Neptune worries that Max has entered the rebellious teenage stage and is not quite sure how to handle him. It turns out though that his son was merely protecting his sister because his friend was into drugs and stole some of Rachel’s jewellery to help fund his habit. On further enquiry, they learn that drugs are being sold at their school. Neptune and Shark decide to use their sons, Max and Link to help crack down on the drug dealing at their school so they can put a stop to it. In the fourth dream, Shark’s daughter Jacqueline gets involved in a Miss Teen beauty pageant. Jacqueline, befriends two of the other contestants named Rosemary and Christina much to the disgust of their competitive mothers. As the competition hots up the contestants start suffering accidents and mishaps by someone wanting to remove the competition. It turns deadly when Josephine (Jackie’s twin) is poisoned in mistake for her and almost dies. When Neptune wakes up, he realizes that his subconscious mind has given him a clue as to who and where the counterfeiters are and they lead the police straight to the counterfeiter’s headquarters, once again proving that they’re the best in the business. So good in fact, that they can solve crimes in their sleep!