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Jennifer Chambliss Bertman's Book Scavenger is a puzzle-packed mystery for 9 year olds about a girl who moves to the city where her favourite game was invented.
Emily Crane is twelve and three-quarters, and San Francisco is her ninth state. Her parents are on a mission to live once in every state in the country (yes, all fifty). So she's very used to being the new girl.
The one thing that comes with her every time is Book Scavenger. People hide second-hand books around a city and post a clue online that leads to each one. The levels are named after famous detectives and Emily is working her way up to Auguste Dupin.
The man who invented it, Garrison Griswold, lives in San Francisco. He's about to announce a brand-new game. Then he doesn't turn up.
Your reader already knows why, because the first chapter shows them. Two men stop him in a train station and demand "the book". And the special Edgar Allan Poe story he was carrying ends up wedged behind a bin, where nobody's thinking to look.
Meanwhile Emily meets James, the boy who lives upstairs. He sends her a puzzle down the side of the house in a rusty sand pail on a rope. Who wouldn't want a neighbour like that? He's also named his cowlick Steve.
Then he solves her cipher for her without being asked, and she's furious. (She'd only missed one letter!) It's such a real bit of making a friend. Wanting help and hating being helped, all at the same time.
The clues are right there on the page, so a sharp reader can have a crack at the cipher and the magic square before Emily does.
Underneath the codes there's something quieter too. Emily's sure she'll always be the outsider, because her family never stays anywhere long enough for proper friends. If your child has ever been the new one at school, that part might land.
The opening chapter is properly tense. One of the men shoots Mr Griswold in the back, and there's blood on the station wall. After that he's in hospital in a critical condition and Emily worries about him a lot. (This isn't a spoiler, it's the first few pages.)
A child who's upset by guns might want a grown-up nearby for that chapter. One who loves a proper mystery will be hooked.
For another puzzle-mad brother and sister who used to be best friends, try The Explorer's Code. Charlie turns everything he sees into Atbash cipher, and his big sister Anna just wants an old manor house with a few forbidden rooms to explore.
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