Pied Piper
An adventure story about what happens to the children in Hamelin after the Pied Piper has led them away. Richardson creates a magical world through inventive wordplay, uninhibited imagination and a facility with rhyme for middle to advanced readers.
A talking cat, intelligent rats, and a strange boy cooperate in a Pied Piper scam until they try to con the wrong town and are confronted by a deadly evil rat king.
Elaborates on the tale of "The Pied Piper," told from the point of view of a boy who is too ill to keep up when a piper spirits away the healthy children of a plague–ridden town after being cheated out of full payment for ridding Hameln of rats.
By Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple
When Callie interviews the band, Brass Rat, for her school newspaper, her feelings are ambivalent, but when all the children of Northampton begin to disappear on Halloween, she knows where the dangerous search must begin.