Among the four people who wrote about this audiobook, one signs as David Kelly. The author credit on the same listing reads David A. Kelly. That response carries a five, it was posted fourteen days after release, and it happens to know that the Bobblehead Hall of Fame sits in downtown Milwaukee and that another book in the series was built around the same team. The name could belong to any number of people, and a mystery series set in a Milwaukee ballpark will naturally attract local readers. It is still the kind of coincidence a listener deserves to see before weighing what the column says.
Scotty Kwas Keeps Two Detectives Apart
Nothing on the record settles that question, and a reviewer has no business settling it either. What can be said is what the response actually contains: it names The Sausage Race Chase, it lists Milwaukee locations including the Harley-Davidson Museum, and it adds a parenthetical confirming where the Bobblehead Hall of Fame can be found. That is a tour guide's paragraph, not a reader's reaction. Whether it came from the author, from a relative, or from a Milwaukee parent with a long memory, it functions as promotion of the setting, and it stands as one of only four visible grades.
Scotty Kwas is the sole reader credited, and for this format that is the question worth asking. Ballpark Mysteries runs on two young detectives, Mike and Kate, trading theories at speed while a field of suspects assembles around them. One voice has to keep those two apart across an hour and thirty-five minutes without letting either tip into cartoon. No listener has left an opinion on how that goes, so the credit is the only evidence in the building. Curveball Books adds no production note, no mention of sound effects, and no indication of whether the series facts are read straight or performed.
What Happens to the Amazing Facts in Audio
Mike and Kate are in Milwaukee for the Brewers and the Cubs, and the crime lands before the first pitch. A new bobblehead of the Brewers' star hitter goes missing. A frozen custard cone bobblehead turns up in its place. Threats start swirling, suspects pile up, and the pair have until the final out to work out who arranged the swap. That is a well-built children's mystery premise: a low-stakes theft with a comic substitution at the center of it, a hard deadline supplied by the game itself, and a setting that lets a culprit hide in plain sight.
Each Ballpark Mysteries book also includes what the publisher calls amazing facts about the team and its ballpark, and in audio that promise behaves differently from the way it behaves in print. A young reader skims a fact box and moves on. A young listener has to sit through it, which either becomes the best stretch of the trip or the moment attention drifts out the window. The record says nothing about how the facts are handled, whether they are woven into the case or delivered as a segment. For a parent choosing between the printed book and the recording, that is the one genuine difference, and it goes unaddressed.
Curveball Books has pitched this at exactly the right length. An hour and a half fills a drive to practice, an afternoon indoors, or the stretch between dinner and bed, and it finishes inside a single sitting, which for a seven-year-old is the difference between a completed story and an abandoned one. Chapter-book mysteries at this age live or die on momentum, and a short runtime protects it. The response that comes from a young listener's household calls this one of the best yet, and from a household serially working through the series that carries some weight.
The Column Documents a Print Habit Here
Book twenty-three is a strange place to arrive, and this listing does nothing to smooth the entry. The page carries neither a summary of what came before nor an explanation of who Mike and Kate are beyond their first names, and it stays silent on whether the pair have aged across twenty-two earlier cases. In practice, series like this are engineered to be entered anywhere, and the premise here needs no history whatsoever. Even so, a parent looking at a number that high has a fair question about where to start, and the page supplies neither a reading order nor a reassurance that one is unnecessary.
Four written grades sit under this listing and every one of them is a five. The badge reads 4.8 across nine votes. Nine votes produced that number; four written responses sit beneath it; how the two sets overlap is not something the page will show you. The useful signal is the shape, not the score: everybody who took the trouble to type gave full marks, and nobody who typed had a reservation worth recording. Nine is a small sample in any case, and small samples travel a long way on a single grade.
Kids are the readers here, but the column is written by the adults who buy for them, and all four of those adults describe reading. A parent reports a son who started during the pandemic and still devours every single one, even though he has outgrown them. Another says an eight-year-old loves this book. A third relays a verdict secondhand from a son who ranks it among the best so far. Not one of them mentions a recording, a voice, or a car journey. The column documents a print habit, while the listing is selling something else entirely.
Ninety-Five Minutes, the Cheapest Listening Experiment
Families driving to a game are the natural audience, along with any child in the eight-year-old bracket the column keeps pointing at. It works for reluctant readers who will happily listen to a story they refuse to sit down with, and for baseball households where the team names carry a charge of their own. Wrong pick for a child who needs a longer arc to get invested, for anyone hoping a mystery will generate real menace, and for a listener who came for the Brewers instead of for Mike and Kate, because the ballpark is backdrop and the bobblehead is the case.
Kelly has written a tidy, local, kid-sized mystery, and the recording drops it neatly inside a single car ride. The oddity in the review column changes nothing about the book itself; it changes how much weight four unanimous fives can reasonably carry. Ninety-five minutes is the entire commitment here, which makes this one of the cheapest experiments a parent can run on a young listener who insists on hating books.
Questions Listeners Ask
Can a young listener start this audiobook at book twenty-three?
The premise needs no history: a missing bobblehead, a substituted custard cone, and a deadline set by the game. Mike and Kate are introduced by first name and nothing else is assumed. The listing offers no recap of earlier cases and no reading order, so a newcomer is relying on the series being built to be entered anywhere.
What do the ballpark facts add in audio?
The publisher promises amazing facts about the team and its ballpark in every volume. In print those live in a box a child can skip; in a recording they have to be sat through. Nothing on the record says whether they are threaded into the story or delivered as a separate segment, which is the one real print-versus-audio difference here.
Does the review signed David Kelly come from the author of this audiobook?
Nothing on the listing establishes that, and it should not be assumed. What is visible is a five-star response signed David Kelly against an author credit reading David A. Kelly, posted two weeks after release, naming an earlier volume and several Milwaukee landmarks. Readers can weigh that themselves.
