This appetizing assortment is a nifty invitation to further mystery-reading.
A selection of 12 original, traditional mysteries loosely organized by minigenre: locked rooms, closed systems, poisonings, and dog stories.
For readers relatively new to the genre, this British import offers a nice selection of the ways these puzzle pieces can be worked out, with plenty of allusions to classics in the field. The young protagonists include both boys and girls, from preteens to young workers. The title character in the opening "Emily and the Detectives" is "a small muddy brown girl" (wonderfully accomplished but “unfortunately dusky” in the parlance of the time and place); another takes place among Jamaican immigrants in a London neighborhood in which an official is described as a "white woman”; a third is set among an earlier wave of immigration, the French in the late 18th century. Most of the mysterious events take place in England, from the 1700s to the present day. There are murders and stolen jewels, kidnapped dogs and a spoiled Carnival costume. Too many cases depend on the discovery of a stray piece of waste, but others feature the sharp eyes and logical skills of the young puzzle-solvers. Several, including the one from editor Katherine Woodfine, author of The Mystery of the Clockwork Sparrow (2016), feature characters from their authors’ mystery series, but otherwise there are no author biographies.
This appetizing assortment is a nifty invitation to further mystery-reading. (Mystery/short stories. 10-15)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4052-8264-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Egmont USA
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
A fun, if messy, thriller that’s not afraid to go straight over the top.
A middle schooler must outrun a cadre of strange individuals while puzzling out the truth of what he is in this science-fiction offering.
Fourteen-year-old Noah Prime longs to live somewhere bigger than his small town of Arbuckle, Oregon, though he is happily involved in motocross—at least until he learns that the course is being torn down to make way for a condo development. This bad news coincides with some particularly strange happenings in Noah’s life, such as a literal (and very confusing) collision he has with Sahara, a girl that he comes to find very interesting. This is followed by his experiencing a brief and total paralysis while arguing with some bullies, which his friend Ogden, who is on the autism spectrum, insists is due to a psychological phenomenon called conversion disorder. The truth turns out to be much more complex, and it sends Noah, younger sister Andi, Ogden, and Sahara on a madcap quest involving aliens, time travel, an erupting volcano, and much more. The adventure is laced throughout with goofy, sarcastic humor, balancing the fantastical and somewhat confusing turns of events. While there is resolution at the story’s end, it also clearly sets the stage for a follow-up. The main characters read White by default.
A fun, if messy, thriller that’s not afraid to go straight over the top. (Science fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: April 11, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-7595-5524-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
Light on gore and corpses; otherwise a full-bore, uncomplicated shriekfest.
Does anyone who volunteers to spend a night in a derelict haunted hotel on a dare deserve what they get?
“The hotel is hungry. And we aren’t leaving here until it’s fed.” In what reads like a determined effort to check off every trope of the genre, Alexander sends new arrival Jasmine, along with two friends and several dozen other classmates, to the long-abandoned Carlisle Hotel for the annual seventh grade Dare—touching off a night of terror presided over by the leering, autocratic Grand Dame and complete with sudden gusts and blackouts, spectral visions, evil reflections in mirrors, skeletons, a giant spider, gravity reversals, tides of oily black sludge sucking screaming middle schoolers down the drain, and so much more. (No gore, though, aside from a few perfunctory drops of blood from one small scratch.) The author saves a twist for the end, and as inducement to read alone or aloud in the dark by flashlight, both his language and the typography crank up the melodrama: “He walks toward us, past the mirror, and I see it— / a pale white face in the reflection, / a gaunt, skeletal grimace, / with sharpened teeth / and hollow black eyes, staring at him / with its mouth / wide / open / in a scream….” Jasmine presents White; her closest friends are Rohan, whose name cues him as South Asian, and Mira, who has dark skin.
Light on gore and corpses; otherwise a full-bore, uncomplicated shriekfest. (Horror. 10-13)Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-338-70215-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
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