Criminal Elements

This 50,000 word, very funny, humerous book should attact the same audience as did the movie Home Alone. Beau is the center piece making it a david and goliath theme same as Home Alone. It is wild and Buster Kittenish softened by a romance and some relationships. The author plans to make it a series.
Eleven-year-old Beau has never broken the rules before, or thought 'out of the box' before, or been on top of things before like he will on his upcoming trip to Joplin, Missouri. Beau has never even met a criminal, let alone tussled with one. He anticipates none of this as his bossy mom gives him the bad news -- he's being shipped off to his grandma's for the summer.
We first see Beau boarding a train with his brassy-mouthed, oversized, fat-assed parrot, Wheezer. Shortly, Beau steps off the train in Possumgravy (named after a frisky gravy whipped up from road kill) to a convivial ninny, his grandma, Lenore Blackburn. She's a gassy-bottomed babushka, but she's kin, and he'll live with it.
And, fairly rapidly Beau becomes suspicious. He worries that Grandma's neighbors are up to something--out to do a hit-and-run job on her money. Lacking evidence, Beau fails to convince his mother, and the local policeman of Grandma's possible peril. So, he must go up against the crooks himself.
Nat, his wife Mabel and their son Carl, Grandma's new neighbors, are relatively unsuccessful small-time thieves, but they can be a lethal force if things don't go their way. And, Nat's family has one other outstanding quality ── persistence: they are as relentless as a porker after a Cinnabon.
Yet, they can't just go over to Lenore's house, bonk her on the head and take her money. The problem is, when they picked up the rumor that Lenore Blackburn had a stash of expensive jewelry, they never learned where she hid it. Until they uncover its location, they are bound to a more subtle approach.
You don't have to hit Grandma on the head with a claw hammer more than a couple of hundred times before she finally accepts that her new neighbors are not nice people.
In the last scene we may just see a big change in Beau. In the past he has been a meek, lonely submissive kid to his mothers overbearing, self-serving chatter. This summer may bring something else out in him. He just might come back different.