Aggie Morton, Mystery Queen – Peril at Owl Park

Marthe Jocelyn's Peril at Owl Park is a country house mystery for 10 year olds narrated by a girl who fully intends to be a writer one day.

What happens

It's Christmas 1902 and Aggie Morton is off to Owl Park, the manor house her sister Marjorie has married into. Her grandmother travels with her, and so does her friend Hector Perot, a Belgian boy who bows properly, says enchanté and can raise one eyebrow at a time.

This one follows within weeks of Aggie and Hector's first case. They worked out a murder together in their own town, and Aggie has not stopped seeing the body whenever she closes her eyes.

Owl Park is glorious and freezing. The servants stand outside in a line in the snow to greet the coach, because that's how it has been done for centuries. A yew tree fills the great hall with real candles clipped to its branches. James's mother is a dowager with a mouth pinched into a button who greets Aggie's grandmother by asking whether she does stairs.

Then an electric motorcar comes skidding up the drive carrying two guests in fur coats down to the ankle, and the husband hands over an ornate wooden box that has apparently sat in a bank vault for years, with a spooky family legend attached to it.

What makes the book is Aggie's narrating voice. Told to descend from the coach with some small show of breeding, she uses the footman's shoulder as a vaulting pole. She catalogues the shivering servants as penguins on an iceberg, then explorers seeking the North Pole, then puppies stranded in a snowbank. Her mother calls her interest in death a Morbid Preoccupation. Aggie rather agrees.

Lucy, the almost-cousin, is ten and utterly unstoppable, and asks to hear every gruesome detail of the murder about four minutes after meeting them.

Something to have in mind. Aggie's father died last year and her mother is still in mourning and has stayed at home, so quiet grief runs right through the Christmas. And the book keeps the promise its cover makes. A body is found on Christmas morning, and the story tells you so before it happens.

There's a lot of pleasure in the period detail, which never feels like homework. Nobody knows how to open the door of a motorcar. The wood cupboard in the passage is explained by Lucy with enormous authority.

What to read next

If your reader wants the case that started all this, The Body under the Piano is in the library too. It's where a very shy Aggie first meets Hector in a sweet shop on Union Street, and discovers she is far more interested in a corpse than anyone was expecting.