Ruby Redfort: Catch Your Death

Catch Your Death is Lauren Child's third Ruby Redfort spy story for 9 year olds, and it drops her code-cracking heroine in the wilderness with five energy bars and a home-made compass.

What happens

Ruby is thirteen and secretly works for a spy agency called Spectrum. She's brilliant at codes. What she really wants is to be a proper field agent, and that means passing survival training first.

So every day after school a helicopter collects her and flies her to a mountain camp. Her teacher there is Sam Colt, a gruff old tracker in a wide-brimmed hat. She learns to find water, light a fire, build a shelter and cook a stew out of roots and ugly-looking fungi (she'd much rather have banana milk).

Ruby has read every survival book going and knows the rules off by heart. That's the problem. Colt keeps telling her to throw away the handbook and trust her gut. For the first time in her life she's failing at something, and she doesn't like it one bit.

Then comes the test. A parachute drop in the dark, somewhere cold she doesn't know, with a coded list of tasks and three days to reach base camp alone. It starts well. Then the mistakes begin, and the book counts them off for you one at a time. Wet boots. Skipped meals. A storm. A very bad idea about crossing a river.

Has your reader ever been so sure they knew best that they stopped listening? They'll recognise Ruby here. It's rather nice to watch a know-it-all get it wrong, especially one this funny.

And she is funny. Her T-shirt says "trust me, I'm a doctor". Urgent spy messages arrive toasted onto her bread. She and a fellow trainee called Holbrook insult each other all day and are obviously great friends.

Back home in Twinford there's a heatwave, forest fire warnings and a perfume launch her mum is desperate to be invited to. There are tigers loose in the city in this one too, because somebody has been letting very rare animals out on purpose.

It's worth knowing the danger is real. Ruby is swept down rapids, gashes her foot badly and passes out alone, and there's a passing mention of two agents who died in a blizzard. A reader who frets about children getting hurt may find the survival test tense. One who likes an adventure with proper stakes will race through it.

What to read next

It reads best after the first two. If they skipped the one where Ruby learns to dive (Holbrook is there too), that's Take Your Last Breath.