Agatha Oddly – The Silver Serpent

Lena Jones's The Silver Serpent is an Agatha Oddly mystery for 11 year olds about a missing curator and a very famous painting that doesn't look quite right.

What happens

It starts on a school trip to the National Gallery. Agatha has loved Van Gogh's Sunflowers since her mum used to bring her to see it. Today the yellows look paler, and nobody else seems to notice.

Then a friend waves an ultraviolet torch at it (to make her nail varnish glow, obviously). A tiny ornate letter A shows up under the signature. Invisible ink, on a priceless painting?

Agatha also meets Arthur, a floppy-haired boy who knows what impasto means and quotes Poirot. She's delighted. Meeting someone who loves the same things is rare for her.

The next morning she finds out why he was there. Arthur is her new partner, and their case is a senior curator at the gallery who never turned up for her flight to Colombia. The police aren't worried yet. They'll only step in if she hasn't been found by Friday.

Agatha is SUCH good company. She sees the world as a detective would, filing facts in her head and working out what colour code a man's angry face would be. She changes into a disguise to get out of school, jogs through tunnels under London and fits in a kung fu lesson before tea. She's also a little lonely and very determined.

It's worth knowing that her mum died seven years ago, before any of this. The police said it was a bike accident and Agatha doesn't believe them. She talks to her mum's photo at night and she's still searching for the truth, so there's real sadness under the fun.

Your reader will need to be happy with a heroine who bends the rules (quite a lot). She skips lessons, tells her dad she's jogging and crawls through a smelly tunnel in the dark.

This one comes after Agatha has already solved two big cases, and it assumes you know how. If your reader is new to her, begin with The Secret Key and come back to this.

What to read next

If they're hooked on detectives who think in Agatha Christie, try Murder Most Unladylike. Daisy and Hazel run their own secret detective society at boarding school, Daisy's tuck box is full of crime novels, and it's Hazel who finds a teacher's body.