Agatha Oddly – Murder at the Museum

Murder at the Museum is the second of Lena Jones's Agatha Oddly mysteries, a London detective story for 11 year olds starring a thirteen-year-old who simply can't leave a crime alone.

What happens

Agatha is coming out of the cinema in Leicester Square when her best friend Liam shows her a news alert. Someone who worked at the British Museum has been killed, and something is missing from a display case.

Her first feeling is delight (she's a bit embarrassed about that). The summer holidays have been far too quiet, and her motto is "No Case Too Odd".

Liam won't come. So Agatha goes home, makes herself a peanut butter and salad cream sandwich (a mistake), tells her dad she's having an early night and climbs out of her attic skylight and down an old oak tree.

What follows is a proper night-time adventure. She sneaks in dressed as a museum attendant called Felicity. She throws a police officer off the scent by asking whether he likes dogs. And in a dusty basement she finds one patch of floor that's been scrubbed very recently.

Behind an old boiler there's a hole in the wall. At the end of it is a Tube station that closed decades ago, with rails that someone has kept shiny.

Agatha is the narrator, and she's brilliant fun to spend time with. She keeps imaginary filing cabinets of disguises in her head, takes mental Polaroids of every clue and hears Hercule Poirot egging her on when she's scared. Who wouldn't want a Belgian detective in their ear in a dark tunnel?

Home is just as intriguing. She lives with her dad in a cottage in the middle of Hyde Park, and he's suddenly had a truly awful brown suit with mustard pinstripes dry-cleaned. Who is he trying to impress?

It's worth knowing that there's some real sadness under the fun. The killing happens off the page, and Agatha only reads about it on a phone. But her mum died when she was younger. The police said it was a bike accident and Agatha doesn't believe them, and she feels angry about it.

If your reader loves secret tunnels, disguises and a heroine who's always one step ahead of the grown-ups (and sometimes one step too far), they'll have a lot of fun here.

What to read next

It's a series worth starting at the beginning, though. The Secret Key is where it all starts, with Agatha in the headmaster's office hearing about the thirteenth time she's been in trouble this term.