A to Z Mysteries – The Panda Puzzle

Ron Roy's The Panda Puzzle is a race-against-the-clock mystery for 5 year olds about a baby panda who goes missing from the town zoo.

What happens

Green Lawn has pandas! A mother called Ping and her baby, Winnie, have just arrived at the petting zoo. Half the town turns up to see them, and Ruth Rose has borrowed her dad's camcorder to film it all.

But when Ping comes out of her cave, she charges straight at the fence. A keeper finds an alarm clock in the cave with a note tied to it. Winnie has been kidnapped, and whoever took her wants a million dollars by midnight.

The friends have twelve hours. Can they find a baby panda before the town has to pay?

The clues build up really nicely. There's a fishing knife dropped in the bamboo. There's the ransom note made of letters cut out of a newspaper. And there's Ruth Rose's video, which they watch back at her house. Dink notices exactly where Ping was looking when she got so cross.

Three grown-ups were standing at the microphone that morning. So the friends pretend they're writing a story for the town's panda newspaper and go to interview each of them (Dink's mind goes completely blank at the very first one!). Josh changes his mind about who did it roughly every ten minutes.

Then a jigsaw puzzle with one missing piece gives Ruth Rose a brilliant idea. Stop looking for the kidnapper, and start looking for the panda.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The children end up shut in an old coal cellar in total darkness, and they have to work out how to get themselves free. They stay calm, look after each other and get out by their own cleverness. A child who's nervous of the dark might want you close for that chapter.

There's a sweet moment once it's over. Ruth Rose looks at their coal-black legs and laughs that they look like pandas. And Winnie (who is coal-black too by now) gets a cuddle you won't forget.

Little brothers turn up throughout, which younger siblings will love. Ruth Rose's brother Nate is four, and Josh's twin brothers squabble over the jigsaw.

What to read next

If your reader can't get enough of these three, The Quicksand Question opens with the three friends camped out in Josh's barn and a fire across the meadow at one in the morning.