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Fleur Hitchcock's Dear Scarlett is a mystery for 10 year olds about a girl who's grown up believing her father was a burglar.
Scarlett McNally is eleven. One very wet Saturday morning the doorbell goes, and on the step is a round, shiny man with a Father Christmas beard. He was her dad's solicitor. He's been told to give her a box once she was eleven. He plonks it on the carpet and scuttles off into the rain.
Her dad died five years ago. Nobody at home really talks about him. He was in and out of prison, and her teacher Mrs Gayton never lets her forget it.
So what's in the box? A leather roll of picklocks. A battered copy of Gone with the Wind. Bundles of old postcards, a tiny key, and a strip of paper telling her to keep looking up, keep up the gym and not trust just ANYONE.
Scarlett decides it's all useless. Then she tries the picks on the watercress man's shed in the middle of the night, and they work!
She's such good company as a narrator. She's stroppy and funny and very honest about the bits of herself she isn't proud of. She does handstands to stop herself crying. She stares people out for fun. And she's stuck with Ellie, the policeman's daughter, who has spotless white socks, a DS and a duvet that smells of washing powder (Scarlett is NOT a fan, at first).
It's worth knowing that Scarlett makes a big mistake early on. She lets herself into the sweet shop before anyone's up and helps herself to fizzing snakes and sherbet raspberries. She feels sick about it almost straight away, but it happens.
For a reader who likes their heroines a bit prickly, that's part of the fun. You're right there in her head while she gets things wrong and starts to wonder what her dad was really trying to tell her. And there are grown-ups who seem to know a lot more than they're saying, including a lady mayoress in a leopard-skin coat who stares at Scarlett a little too hard.
If you've got a reader who likes clues they can puzzle over alongside the main character, this one's a treat.
And if they want another Fleur Hitchcock girl who wishes something exciting would happen and then gets a lot more than she bargained for, try Saving Sophia. Lottie's parents are scientists who serve road kill for Sunday lunch, and a school trip brings a quiet girl and a man Lottie is certain is a spy.
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