Buy the book from Amazon UK
Junior
Puffin
Hardback £12.99
ISBN: 0141380527
Reviewed by Mary Hoffman
[Armadillo 6.3 Autumn 2004]
The Chase takes up where Lionboy left off: øIt is a curious thing for a boy to be stuck on a train in an Alpine snowstorm, in a bathroom with six homesick lions.....Ó And from then on the pace never slackens. Charlie Ashanti, in quest of his kidnapped parents, is on the way to Venice on the Orient Express, when the train breaks down in a snowstorm.
Aided by King Boris of Bulgaria, Charlie holes up with the lions in a Venetian palazzo, but it is soon clear that there is mischief afoot. King Boris's secretary Edward is an ambiguous figure and his reasons for caging the lions suspect. Add to the mix that Charlie is mistaken for an angel by the mother of a child he throws his nebuliser to and is volubly praised in Italian every day outside the palazzo where he is now sure he is a prisoner, and you have the same incident-crammed plotting that characterised the first book.
Charlie and the lions escape to Morocco and his parents break out from the clutches of the øCorporacyÓ which is trying to brainwash them. But that doesn't mean their troubles are over. Charlie smiles in the Postcript but that is because, øHe didn't know that what was about to happen would be worse than everything that had happened so far.Ó Fans will be relieved to know that Book three has been delivered.