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Michelle Harrison's A Storm of Sisters is a snowy, spooky adventure for 9 year olds about three sisters who arrive in a frozen village with a ghost story of its own.
Betty, Fliss and Charlie Widdershins are at breakfast when a letter comes from their dad's cousin Clarissa. She's slipped on the ice and broken her ankle, so Granny packs them all off to Wilderness, way up north, to look after her.
Betty is thrilled. She's been itching for an adventure (and Granny can see it in her eyes). Fliss shivers most of the way there, and Charlie just wants snow. And food. Charlie always wants food.
Betty has also sneaked their magical nesting dolls into her luggage, just in case.
The journey in is properly shivery. Once the carriage has crept down an icy slope called Dead Man's Curve and the driver has gone, Betty hears a single horse galloping towards them on an empty road. Granny says it's just the wind playing tricks. Is it, though?
Clarissa is grumpy and VERY bossy (her front door has a list of people who mustn't knock). But by the fire she tells them the legend of Jack Frost, a highway robber who stole a fortune teller's magical crystal ball and fell into the icy lake with it. His sweetheart Elora went out into the snow to find him and died in the cold. And seeing her ghost at a window means someone you love will die.
Then there's a winter market, and a masked ball at Echo Hall, the grand old building by the lake. Clarissa can get them a free room there, thanks to some deal she won't explain. You can feel Betty sniffing out a mystery.
It's such fun being with these three. Betty is brave and practical, Fliss is the romantic who gets seasick, and Charlie says exactly what she thinks ("May he rest in cheese").
The legend is about two deaths in the cold, and that ghostly omen hangs over the opening chapters. Charlie also buries a dead mouse in Fliss's flowerbed (Fliss is NOT impressed). A child who's nervous of ghosts might want the lights on. If your reader loves a chill down the spine with plenty of jokes in between, they'll be gripped.
This is the fourth Pinch of Magic adventure and it builds on the earlier ones, so start with A Pinch of Magic.
If they love a grand old house with a mystery from long ago, try Michelle Harrison's The Thirteen Treasures, where Tanya finds a newspaper cutting about a girl who went missing more than fifty years before.
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