A to Z Mysteries – The Orange Outlaw

New York City, a stolen painting and a very sticky trail of clues make Ron Roy's The Orange Outlaw a big-city mystery for 5 year olds.

What happens

This time the three friends are staying with Uncle Warren for the weekend. His New York flat is ten floors up, with a balcony looking down on the taxis and buses.

He's also looking after something precious for a friend. It's a painting of a rowboat on a lily pond, by Claude Monet, and it's worth a LOT of money.

That evening the whole street is closed for a party to raise money for the zoo. There are jugglers, a ventriloquist with a very cheeky dummy and pizza by the slice. When they get back upstairs, the painting has gone. The door was locked the whole time.

And somebody has eaten every orange in the fruit bowl! There are peels and sticky juice all over the kitchen and out on the balcony.

How did the thief get in? Who even knew the painting was there? Josh thinks it's the doorman (because on TV it's always the butler). Ruth Rose has her eye on the building manager, who has wild orange hair and used to swing on a trapeze. And the old lady downstairs says she saw someone on her balcony.

What's lovely is how much the children do themselves. They interview the neighbours. Josh finds a long orange hair stuck to a kitchen chair. Uncle Warren gets out his microscope at the breakfast table, between blueberry pancakes, so they can compare it with one of Josh's own (he has to pull it out, ouch).

There's a properly clever answer at the end too. Your reader might get there before Dink does, and they'll be very pleased with themselves if they do.

Uncle Warren is a gem. He calls Dink "Donny", which nobody else does. And the friends' teasing keeps everything light, with Josh as hungry as ever. Ruth Rose says he needs feeding ten times a day!

It's set in America, so they say "apartment" and "elevator", but it reads very easily.

What to read next

For another case with animals at the heart of it, The Panda Puzzle has a baby panda taken from the new park in Green Lawn and a ransom note left in her mother's cave.