Benjamin Pratt and the Keepers of the School – In Harm’s Way

In Harm's Way drops you into the middle of a war over a school building, Andrew Clements' mystery for 9 year olds about three children trying to stop the bulldozers.

What happens

Ben, Jill and Robert stand in the principal's office watching a video of themselves. Three kids in a dark corridor. Time stamped at seventeen minutes past three in the morning. Somebody emailed the link anonymously.

Robert gets them out of it by staging a breakdown about his parents, who really did die in a car crash when he was little. Ben watches this with horror and admiration in roughly equal measure. So will your reader.

The Captain Duncan Oakes School sits on the harbour in Edgeport and it is coming down in less than two weeks to make room for a theme park. The children have worked out that the man who built it in 1783 expected exactly this, and hid a run of safeguards around the building for whoever ended up defending it two hundred years later.

One of those safeguards was a brass token that turned out to be the key to a bank account. Fourteen thousand dollars of gold, quietly growing since the eighteenth century, now sitting at over eighty-eight million.

It does not help. The janitor and his new assistant are watching them every minute of the school day, and the next clue is seven words long.

The pleasure here is a treasure hunt with a clock on it, inside a building your reader can picture completely. Hooks along a corridor. A staircase. A hidden compartment that a dog scratched its way into. Ben spends assembly singing with his mouth while his head runs through the clues, which is something every child has done about something.

Be warned that it assumes a lot. This sits well into the series and the book does not stop to catch anyone up. There is an ongoing feud with two adults who genuinely mean the children harm, a dog used as a threat, and a strand about a hidden station on the Underground Railroad, which is American history a British reader may not have met yet. Robert using his parents' deaths as a tactic is played for laughs, and some children will find that brilliant while others will find it horrible.

What to read next

Honestly, start with We the Children instead. It opens with Ben late for registration, finding the old janitor collapsed against a dust mop in an empty corridor, and stopping to help him. That turns out to be their last conversation, and everything in this one grows out of it.