Seizure by Kathy Reichs

Amazon.com summary:
The second novel in the Virals series from #1 bestselling author and inspiration for the TV series Bones - Kathy Reichs!
Ever since Tory Brennan and her friends (Hi, Ben and Shelton) rescued Cooper, a kidnapped wolf pup with a rare strain of parvovirus, they've turned from regular kids into a crime-solving pack! But now the very place that brought them together - the Loggerhead Island Research Institute - is out of funding and will have to shut down. That is, unless the Virals can figure out a way to save it!
So when Tory learns of an old Charleston legend about a famous she-pirate, Anne Bonny, whose fortune was never found, she can't believe her luck - buried treasure is exactly what she needs to save the Institute on Loggerhead! Trouble is, she and her friends aren't the only ones looking for it. And this time, the Virals' special powers may not be enough to dig them out of trouble . . .

Review:
When I saw the first book of this series at the library I thought it might be a lame teen/pulp fiction mystery (like Nancy Drew or The Hardy Boys) with some science thrown in, but recommendations by both James Patterson (of Maximum Ride fame) and Anthony Horowitz (Alex Rider) convinced me to give it a try and I loved it, so of course I had to read the sequel, which in my mind was better than the first one.
The suspense was more intense than I thought a mystery novel could hold. The comic relief (mostly courtesy of Hi and/or Tory's disgust and incongruity with the cotillion program she's been forced into by her dad's total ditz of a girlfriend) was spot on. And the slightly campy elements of a good ol' treasure hunt: maps, booby traps, buried chests and all, made it great fun to read. Tory's hatred of all things girly and the fact that her only friends are guys makes  it fun for both genders to read, though I still wish Reichs hadn't put all the cotillion stuff in there. It may appeal to the female contingent of her audience, but you kinda want to skip over those sections when they happen because you want to find out what happens next in the story. Reichs used the classic mystery novel device of having one big plot twist at the end of the book in Virals (the first of the series), but in Seizure sprinkled many smaller twists throughout the plot, most of them centred around the multiple redundancies in Bonny's treasure hiding scheme or the book's multiple sets of antagonists. It makes the book in general more interesting, but I have to admit I was disappointed when there wasn't a big twist at the end. My only other complaint was the hard to believe idea that adults could have searched for the treasure for years and not found it, and yet it could take four teens two weeks or less to find it.
All in all a very good book. I like this series better than Maximum Ride because with Maximum Ride I couldn't think too hard while reading or my head would explode with all the logic problems and plot holes in it, with the Virals  series though, everything is more believable and logical. The one thing keeping this book from a 5 star rating is the whole "mystery story" element. I would have rather had a more action based novel like Maximum Ride then a mystery based one like Nancy Drew.
4/5 stars