Mystery

This adventure opens with Brian, one of the members of The Misfits Club, who is being chased by a gang intent on harming him. He is confident that he will come to no harm as he is on a bicycle and they are on foot. The best laid plans can however fall and Brian finds himself in peril and unsure of his safety.

Meet the Misfits Club: Brian, Hannah and twins Chris and Sam who have plans for their summer holidays. Enter Amelia, the newest member of the club, who is tasked with investigating an old spooky house…

Roughly once a year comes a children’s book of unexpected brilliance, a book that has you hooked from the first sentence and keeps you eagerly turning pages until the early hours of the morning. It has the feel of an instant classic; and like an addict, you want more. This is such a book.

The first instalment of Terry’s newest trilogy Contagion takes the reader on a fast-paced journey through Scotland, from the isolated Shetland Institute to the idyllic village of Killin. It is in Killin that Shay first meets Kai. Shay was the last person to see Kai’s sister Callie alive before her mysterious disappearance a year ago. Now, as an inexplicable flu sweeps across Scotland leaving death and suffering in its wake, Shay and Kai must find Callie and stop this modern plague.

The first thing that struck me about this book is author Marianna Baer’s impeccable instinct for teen dialogue. From page one, the reader is transported convincingly into sixteen-year-old Quinn Cutler’s life, and the author manages to hold us there until its unusual, ethereal ending.

Following the acclaimed The Bear and The Piano, Grandad’s Secret Giant is David Litchfield’s second offering as an author/illustrator. The story follows a friendly, patchwork-wearing giant who hides his identity to avoid frightening the people of the village because ‘people are scared of things that are different’. When the main character, Billy, finds out through his Grandad about all the philanthropic deeds the Giant has supposedly undertaken, Billy, nudged on by his dog, Murphy, decides to discover if the Giant is, indeed, real.

This gorgeous picturebook has everything – a great plot, a surprising twist, deceptively simple text and beautiful artwork.

Detective Gordon has retired from the police station, leaving it in the small but capable hands of his former mouse assistant, Buffy. Buffy is a brave and resourceful mouse, but eerie sounds outside the station at night have her frightened and worried so she calls on her good friend Gordon to help. Along the way, they encounter a new case involving two missing school children and find that two police are twice as brave and twice as resourceful.

‘Do you want to know a secret? Well, I can’t tell you.’ So begins The Clubhouse Mystery, a lively and funny book centred around Cass and her friends Lex and Nicholas. Together they comprise the Bubble Street Gang, a secret society named after the road on which they live (which is actually called Berbel Street, but who wants to be a member of the Berbel Street Gang?).

Do you want to know a secret? Well, I can’t tell you.

So begins The Clubhouse Mystery, a lively and funny book centred around Cass and her friends Lex and Nicholas. Together they comprise the Bubble Street Gang, a secret society named after the road on which they live (which is actually called Berbel Street, but who wants to me a member of the Berbel Street Gang?).

This is an interesting book giving us, as it does, an interesting glimpse of rural Poland in Soviet times. At least that might interest adults. Children, I suspect, will be far more enthralled by the fun and mayhem of the story itself.