New York Times bestselling series Tensions are running high when multi-billionaire Lars Sjoburg is poisoned and demands to go home and everyone is looking to Dash Gibson to solve the case in this third and final book in the New York Times bestselling Moon Base Alpha series. Moon Base Alpha was supposed to be an exciting place to live, but Dash didn’t expect for it to be this exciting. After solving a murder and rescuing the moon base commander, he just wants to have a calm, quiet thirteenth birthday. But of course multi-billionaire and total pain Lars Sjoburg ruins it—by being poisoned. Now there’s a murderer loose on Moon Base Alpha again . And Dash is charged with finding out who it could have been. Everyone has a motive, and time is running out. Gr 4–6—In this third book in Gibbs's series, emotions and tensions are high among the colonists at Moon Base Alpha after snobby millionaire Lars Sjolberg is poisoned. What should have been an ordinary 13th birthday for Dash Gibson has turned into him solving a murder attempt. It starts as a somewhat ordinary morning for Dash when his father decides to take him on a bit of a moonwalk to play a game of catch. But this is no ordinary game of catch—both Dash and his father are breaking a number of rules by being outside the moon base. Angry demands from the mission commander to return inside soon give way to screams of terror and confusion. The final book in this series continues to deliver the mystery and mayhem that being isolated on the moon can cause. This is an excellent conclusion to a strong trilogy with the many clues and red herrings that mystery lovers expect. Everyone is a suspect, including Dash's own father. Long months aboard Moon Base Alpha and homesickness only add to the heightened tension. VERDICT Fans will enjoy this satisfying ending to a strong series.—William Anderson, Scott County Public Library, IN "This is an excellent conclusion to a strong trilogy with the many clues and red herrings that mystery lovers expect. Everyone is a suspect." ― School Library Journal Stuart Gibbs is the New York Times bestselling author of the Charlie Thorne series, FunJungle series, Moon Base Alpha series, Once Upon a Tim series, and Spy School series. He has written screenplays, worked on a whole bunch of animated films, developed TV shows, been a newspaper columnist, and researched capybaras. Stuart lives with his family in Los Angeles. You can learn more about what he’s up to at StuartGibbs.com. Waste of Space 1 ILLEGAL BASEBALL Earth year 2041 Lunar day 252 Really freaking early in the morning For my thirteenth birthday, my father gave me the greatest present I could have ever hoped for: He took me outside to play catch. Now, before you start thinking that my father was the biggest cheapskate on earth, there are a few things you need to know: For starters, my father couldn’t have been the biggest cheapskate on earth, because we didn’t live on earth. We lived on the moon. We were some of the first lunar colonists. Along with a handful of other scientists and their children, we lived at Moon Base Alpha, the first human settlement in outer space. When NASA had recruited us, they had made it sound like MBA would be the most exciting, amazing, incredible place in the universe. It wasn’t. It turned out, living on the moon was far more difficult than anyone had predicted. But as hard as it was for the adults, it was even worse being a kid there. Not only did we have to deal with the same lousy dehydrated food and cramped sleeping spaces and sadistic toilets as the adults, but there were a host of other problems for kids. Like making friends. There were other kids at MBA, but I hadn’t been given any choice in selecting them. I was just stuck with them, and the only other boy my age, Roddy Marquez, wasn’t much fun to hang out with. You know how, on earth, parents will sometimes drag you to their friends’ house for the night and ask you to hang with their friends’ kid, even though they know the two of you don’t really get along? Well, imagine that, instead of going over to their friends’ house for one night, you’ve gone over for three years. And you can’t leave. That was another problem with being a kid on the moon: You couldn’t go outside and play. Ever. Leaving Moon Base Alpha was extremely dangerous. There were a hundred ways you could die on the lunar surface; we had already lost one person out there and nearly lost another. For this reason, NASA forbade children from ever going outdoors, meaning that we were supposed to spend our whole time on the moon inside a building smaller than your standard Motel 6. Despite it being against the rules, I had experienced the dangers of the surface myself. I had been outside on the moon four times: once while walking to MBA from the rocket that had brought me there and three times due to emergencies. I had nearly died on two of those excursions, which was a 50 percent near-death-expe