Book Scavenger – The Unbreakable Code

The Unbreakable Code by Jennifer Chambliss Bertman is a cipher mystery for 9 year olds about a teacher who does something a teacher shouldn't.

What happens

Emily and James play Book Scavenger. Players hide second-hand books around a city and post clues to them online, and these two are good enough at it that a publisher throws a party in their honour.

At the party Emily wanders to the back of the shop and watches her social studies teacher reach into a stranger's handbag.

That's Mr Quisling. The most rule-following adult James can think of.

What Quisling takes, and then drops, is a card with a bird on the front and a line of nonsense inside. GTTSAJN AJ LTPQKJ. The sentence above it tells you where the key is, if you can spot it, and these two are not children who leave that sort of thing alone.

The code sends them looking for a ship. A real one, buried under San Francisco with dozens of others that Gold Rush crews walked away from. Then a museum guide who has happily explained everything else goes quiet and says the thing they're asking about is cursed, because it starts fires.

One fire has already happened. Your reader saw it being set, because the book keeps leaving Emily to follow a man who calls himself the Phoenix and talks to a candle flame as though it belongs to him.

That's the real pull of it. You know something Emily doesn't, and she's walking straight at it.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

He leaves a cup and a wrapper on a park bench, gets on a bus and works out how long the water will take to reach what's inside. Nobody is hurt where you can see it, but the calm is the whole effect, and a child who frets about fire at home may find it sits with them.

There's a sadder thread too. Mr Griswold, the game-maker the children think the world of, was attacked at a station a few months earlier and has come back smaller, with guard dogs and cameras and no appetite for the silly enormous events he used to run.

It follows an earlier adventure about a lost Edgar Allan Poe manuscript, but the first few chapters fill you in, so starting here works.

What to read next

The Alcatraz Escape has the same pair in another of Griswold's games, an escape room spread across the whole island with a mystery writer nobody has ever seen helping to plan it.