Alice-Miranda in the Alps

Jacqueline Harvey's Alice-Miranda in the Alps is a snowy hotel mystery for 9 year olds, set in a very posh Swiss resort where the grown-up in charge can't stand children.

What happens

Hugh turns up in the kitchen in ski goggles and a balaclava, which is a big clue. The family are off to St Moritz, where Alice-Miranda's mum's company is sponsoring a race at the White Turf. That's horse racing on a frozen lake. (Sloane is horrified. Won't they drown?)

Mrs Oliver and Shilly are coming too, whether they like it or not. It's Shilly's birthday soon, and it turns out she was quite a skier once.

The flight in is properly bumpy, with Hugh co-piloting for the very first time. Millie goes the colour of her mint-green cardigan. Sloane thinks it was fantastic.

Then there's the hotel. Herr Fanger is round and jolly, hands round his own chocolates and carries a tiny dog wearing diamond hair clips. His wife, Frau Doerflinger, is a very different kettle of fish.

Your reader knows something the guests don't. Somebody has left a threatening note at her door, and she's planning to buy a hotel that belongs to Alice-Miranda's family friends. She also loses the key to the hotel vault, and she isn't happy about it.

So when the children take a wrong turn and end up in a private loading bay full of chocolate boxes, she's furious. She calls Alice-Miranda a liar and the others spoiled brats, then smiles sweetly the second their parents appear!

(Isn't it maddening when the grown-ups just can't see it?)

There's a quieter story running alongside. In the opening chapter a girl called Nina begs her dad not to send her grandfather away. Opa has been wandering on the mountain and getting muddled, and he gives Nina his favourite silver box with a tiny singing bird inside. It's gently sad, and it's done kindly.

The cast is big by now, with plenty of in-jokes from earlier trips. It's easy enough to follow, and the snow, the chocolate and the Cresta Run (girls not allowed, which Millie finds outrageous) carry it along.

What to read next

If they like their Alice-Miranda on the move, Alice-Miranda in Paris has the school choir abroad and a famous designer discovering that rolls of his most precious fabric have vanished from his storeroom.