"The Opal Deception," Eoin Colfer, Puffin Books; 2005; 344 pp.

There's only one person on the planet who can have had more fun than I did reading "The Opal Deception" -- the guy who wrote it.

Eoin Colfer is back to tell us yet another tall tale about 14-year-old criminal mastermind Artemis Fowl -- and he's having a whale of a time while he's doing it. It shows. You can almost hear him chuckling away as he plunges his reader back underground into Haven City, secret abode of the Fairy People, where a crisis is about to unfold. In fact, this time something so catastrophic is threatening the People that they need the services of none other than the one human they're terrified of more than any other: Artemis Fowl.

The plot moves faster than a shot from Captain Holly Short's Neutrino 3000 pistol. And speaking of the feisty fairy who was kidnapped by Artemis in Colfer's first book, she's about to become the first woman major in the Lower Elements Police (LEP). Colfer does well in setting up a sweet little sense of calm before his novel blasts off like an LEP shuttle in a magma chute.