Aggie Morton, Mystery Queen – The Body under the Piano

Marthe Jocelyn's The Body under the Piano is a murder mystery for 10 year olds about a shy girl in 1902 who is far more comfortable with a corpse than a conversation.

What happens

Our narrator introduces herself like this. She'll tell you about her new friend first, and save the dead body for later, because that's how proper storytelling works.

Her name is Agatha Morton. She is twelve, she lives in Torquay, and she desperately wants to be a writer. Her new friend is a very precise Belgian boy called Hector Perot, who arranges his liquorice pastilles in straight rows in a box rather than carry them loose in a paper cone.

The joke is not hidden. Enjoy it.

Aggie doesn't go to school. Her mother has decided that children should roam free under the eye of a nursemaid, which in practice means no school, no governess and no friends her own age. So she has invented a whole classroom of imaginary girls instead, named them, dressed them and worried about their quarrels.

Her father died last November, and she misses him with every breath.

Then there's the Mermaid Dance Room above the sweet shop, a charity concert, a great deal of bristling between the local ladies, and at last the dead body she promised us.

What makes this so good is the narrating. Aggie edits herself as she goes. She describes Hector's eyes as being like a glass of lime cordial and then tells herself off, offering glittering emeralds and a new spring leaf instead. She observes a blush and works through raspberry pudding, poached salmon and flamingo feathers before settling.

She also has a gruesome imagination and a grudge or two. There's a glorious stretch where she daydreams an entire horror story about a girl she dislikes, complete with a scheming nurse and a cellar of unusually large spiders. Any child who has ever invented a satisfying disaster for a classmate will feel seen.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Somebody is murdered, the children find the body, and a woman Aggie is fond of is suspected of it. It's a cosy, period sort of murder rather than a frightening one, and the writing is warm throughout, but it is a murder and your reader should be up for that.

The grief is the other thing. Aggie's father has been dead less than a year, her mother is flattened by it, and it sits underneath every page. It's handled beautifully, and it may still land hard on a child who has lost someone.

There's also period snobbery about refugees arriving in the town, repeated as gossip by people the book clearly thinks are foolish. Good material for a conversation rather than a reason to avoid it.

What to read next

For the next one, Peril at Owl Park moves everybody to her sister's enormous manor house for Christmas, with a maze, a secret passage, a troupe of travelling actors and a cursed emerald.