Meet Stuart Gibbs

author of the Fun Jungle and Spy School series

What is the plot of your new book?

Bear Bottom is the seventh book in the bestselling FunJungle series. In this one, Teddy Fitzroy is on vacation near Yellowstone National Park when he encounters two mysteries. First, buffalo are mysteriously disappearing from Yellowstone.  And then, a massive local grizzly bear breaks into the house where he is staying, causing chaos — and once it’s gone, an extremely expensive necklace is missing. Teddy needs to figure out what happened to the necklace — and the buffalo.

This is the first FunJungle book that does not take place at FunJungle. Why did you move the location?

It was time to shake things up. I felt that continuing the series at FunJungle would start to feel repetitive, and at the same time realized that there are lots of great locations for Teddy to solve other crimes involving animals. Plus, if FunJungle had one more crisis, the government would probably shut the place down.

What inspired you to write this story?

I had always wanted to do a ‘locked room mystery.’ (Not surprisingly, that a classic sort of mystery where a crime occurs in… yes, a locked room. Where no one could get in or out.) And then I thought it would be fun to have a scene where Teddy confronts a bear in a house. Those two ideas combined well together, so I brainstormed for a couple weeks and came up with the mystery. 

Have you ever run into a bear in the wild?

Yes. Quite a few times, actually.

Was it ever scary?

A couple times it was. The scariest was when I was with my son. We were walking along and saw a bear cub pop up out of the grass not far ahead of us. Then we turned around and found the mother behind us. Being between a mother and a cub is not a good position. But bears really don’t want to hurt you unless it’s an absolute last resort. The cub walked around us, rejoined its mother and they left us alone.

About Stuart

Stuart Gibbs is the New York Times bestselling author of Charlie Thorne and the Last Equation and the FunJungle, Spy School, and Moon Base Alpha series. He has written the screenplays for movies like See Spot Run and Repli-Kate, worked on a whole bunch of animated films, and developed TV shows for Nickelodeon, Disney Channel, ABC, and Fox. Stuart lives with his family in Los Angeles. You can learn more about what he's up to at StuartGibbs.com.

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