Swindle

Swindle is a children's novel by the American writer Gordon Korman, published in 2008. It is a caper story about the recovery of a valuable baseball card, and it began a series that continued with several further books about the same group of children.

Griffin Bing is a sixth-former with a habit of planning, and the novel opens with a scheme that does not work: he invites his whole class to a sleepover in an empty house that is due to be demolished. Only his best friend, Ben Slovak, turns up. While they are there Griffin finds a baseball card from 1920, signed by Babe Ruth, and it turns out to be worth a great deal of money.

S. Wendell Palomino, whom the boys call Swindle, takes the card from them for a fraction of its value. Griffin's father is working on an invention that needs money, so the loss matters, and the boys decide to recover what was taken. What follows is a burglary planned by children, with a team recruited for the particular skills each of them has and a great many things that can go wrong.