There are now over 30 Horrible Harry books in this series and author Suzy Kline is keeping them current with the times. This time the theme is dealing with bullies.

South School will soon be having a book fair. Each classroom has the incentive to read more books before the book fair begins because for each book read the reader will have his/her name entered into a drawing for a free book from the book fair. Now the plot thickens when third graders are given the chance to become members of the School Safety Patrol.  Harry does not make the safety patrol, but Mary, and his friend Doug do. Mary soon becomes overly zealous in her duties as a Safety Patrol Hall Monitor.  Warnings are no longer given for first offensives, but citations are to the point where Doug, her partner, feels she is becoming a bully.  Students are having a difficult time getting to and from the library unscathed with their book fair raffle tickets when Mary is on duty. Then on top of that, Doug sees Mary offer to deposit students’ tickets for them, but before she does, Mary erases the back of the ticket and writes something in ink on the back of each ticket. Could Mary be stuffing the raffle box with tickets from other students with her name on them? Doug and Harry try to catch Mary at her game before they report her to the teacher.

Mary learns a lesson by being giving a warning, not a citation, by an older safety patrol member, when she runs in the hallway on her week-off from safety patrol.

Then, when Mary wins the classroom drawing for the free book from the fair book, Harry and Doug discover Mary has been neatly rewriting the students’ names on their tickets and not her own name, as they had thought.