Skulduggery Pleasant – The Faceless Ones

Derek Landy's The Faceless Ones is a creepy, very funny murder mystery for 11 year olds, and it's the third Skulduggery Pleasant book.

What happens

Begin with the first one if your reader's new to the series, because this picks up where the earlier books left off. Valkyrie Cain is fourteen now (and will happily tell you so, along with what she thinks of your beard).

Somebody is killing Teleporters, the rare sorcerers who can vanish from one place and pop up in another. Four are dead. Each was stabbed in the back, and none of them put up a fight.

The trouble is that Skulduggery and Valkyrie aren't allowed anywhere near the case. The head of the Sanctuary has sacked them. The detective he's put in charge is a sneering man with a silly goatee and two bodyguards with scythes.

So of course they investigate anyway. The trail leads to a lake up in the mountains at Glendalough, a cross old Sea Hag with a fish's tail and a dead man who's been under the water for fifty years. He knows something about a gate that some very old, very terrible beings have been waiting to come back through.

It's a really good mystery. Skulduggery numbers his theories (Theory Two, Variation B) and Valkyrie rolls her eyes. A wax figure of a rock star turns out to be the lock on a secret door. Her dad asks her advice on an anniversary present and she suggests milk.

There's a lovely ordinary moment too. Valkyrie finds out her reflection has had her first kiss for her, at school, with a boy called Gary. Who wouldn't be cross about that?

It's worth knowing it gets gruesome. The book opens on a murdered man lying in his own dried blood. Valkyrie is nearly drowned by the Sea Hag. When they carry the dead man out of the lake, one of his legs falls off, and Skulduggery hands it to her to carry. It's played for laughs, but it's a corpse all the same.

A reader who's squeamish about bodies might want to wait a while. A reader who loves a gross-out joke in the middle of a ghost story will be in heaven.

What to read next

If they'd like another fourteen-year-old who doesn't believe the official story for a second, Stormbreaker could be next. When the police tell Alex Rider his uncle died in a car crash without his seat belt on, Alex knows that can't be right.