Calendar Mysteries – November Night

Ron Roy's November Night is a next-door mystery for 5 year olds about twin brothers who just HAVE to know what the new neighbours are up to.

What happens

It's the eleventh of the Calendar Mysteries, and the Pinto twins are counting down to Thanksgiving. Bradley and Brian used to play in the huge hollow tree next door. Then Mr and Mrs Sargent moved in and built a tall fence all the way round it.

That's a real problem. Brian's secret money jar is hidden inside that tree under the hay (twenty dollars and thirty-seven cents!). So is Bradley's special torch with glow-in-the-dark bats on the handle.

Then the neighbours wrap the whole tree in a giant blue tarp. At night it glows, and you can see shadows moving about inside. Are they spies? Bank robbers? Brian has a few ideas.

With their friends Nate and Lucy, the twins tail the Sargents round town. An axe, a rope ladder, a little motor and a bag of bike parts. What on earth are they making? The clues keep getting odder, and your reader gets to puzzle over them too.

And then there's the dog. He's enormous, black and hairy, and Brian takes him for a bear at first. The kids nickname him Killer. Poor Bradley even has a nightmare about him.

It's very funny how the four of them egg each other on. Nate tells a pretend troll he tastes like rotten eggs. He also dreams up the newspaper headline if the dog catches them. Bradley can see exactly how Brian's big plan might go wrong (and says so, more than once).

That plan is a midnight sneak-out during a sleepover, everyone dressed in dark clothes like ninjas. You might raise an eyebrow at that! It's played for giggles, though, and the suspense never tips into properly scary.

It's set in America, so it's Thanksgiving the kids are waiting for rather than Christmas. Expect pumpkin pie, a basset hound called Pal and a lot of peeking through a knothole in the fence.

If you've got a reader who loves a "what's going on in there?" kind of mystery, this is a lovely one. The sentences are short and simple, and the ending is very warm.

What to read next

For more of the Pinto twins and their gang, try January Joker. It's a snowy night this time, with strange lights by the barn and something hopping about that Bradley is sure isn't from this planet.