Skulduggery Pleasant – Playing with Fire

Derek Landy's Playing with Fire is a fast, funny and pretty dark fantasy for 11 year olds that opens with a thirteen-year-old dangling off a church tower.

What happens

It follows on from the first Skulduggery Pleasant book, so if your reader hasn't met these two yet, start there. Stephanie goes by a new name now, Valkyrie Cain, and she's learning magic from the skeleton detective.

She can shove the air and click up a little flame. The catch is her powers don't work when she panics, and she's hanging by her fingertips over Dublin while a would-be killer called Scapegrace gloats above her. (He keeps telling her he's a trained killing machine. She's read his file. He hasn't actually killed anyone.)

Then the real trouble arrives. Baron Vengeous, one of the most feared generals of an old war, has broken out of a prison in Russia. He wants to bring a monster called the Grotesquery to life, and he has a vampire called Dusk to run his errands.

Meanwhile Valkyrie's reflection steps out of her mirror every morning and goes to school for her. It does her homework, eats her dinner and reports back at night. What child hasn't wished for one of those? It doesn't stay simple for long.

The jokes land as fast as the punches. Skulduggery says he was late to the rescue because his shoelace was undone. Her dad tells her subtraction is overrated. Her aunt Beryl is as awful as ever at the breakfast table.

Be ready for some proper horror alongside the fun. Vengeous kills a man the moment he sets foot in Ireland. Dusk bites a young couple from Valkyrie's town, and they stagger after her with torn necks and blood on their clothes, two nights away from turning into vampires themselves. Over in London there's a skin-crawling villain who hunts by the sound of a crying baby.

That's a lot for a reader who scares easily. For one who's already devoured the first book and loves the shivery bits, it's exactly what they'll want.

What makes it work is that Valkyrie is brave without being fearless. She's terrified on that tower. She's still the one who cuts through the park on her own to check on her reflection.

What to read next

If those bitten, staggering townspeople were the bit that stuck, Charlie Higson's The Enemy is in the library too. The grown-ups in London have caught a sickness that turns them into hunters, and the children left behind go out with spears and clubs to scavenge for food.