Finch House

Ciera Burch's Finch House is a creepy mystery for 10 year olds about a girl who breaks a promise to her grandfather and walks into the one house he told her to stay away from.

What happens

Micah is eleven and has lived with Poppop for nearly all of it. They go "networking" together, which is his word for rescuing treasure from other people's rubbish. Now she and her mum are moving an hour away, and Micah is dreading it.

Finch House is a tall yellow house with a tower, on a street full of rich people's houses, and for as long as she's known it, it has stood empty and falling apart. Poppop once made her promise never to go near it. She's been sneaking past on her bike ever since.

Then one winter morning it's been done up. A boy called Theo is lying in the snow in the front garden. And when Poppop turns up to collect her, he stares at the house like it might eat him.

Micah's mum lets slip that Poppop had an older sister who went missing, and the last place he saw her was Finch House. That night Micah finds an old newspaper story online about two more children who vanished from the same house. The following morning Poppop drives off, and he doesn't come back.

It's wonderfully atmospheric. There are tiny locked doors in almost every room, shadows Theo swears move about, and a cold touch on Micah's cheek the second she steps over the doorstep. Theo's big sister Renee loves winding them both up with spooky stories.

At its heart, though, it's about Micah and Poppop, and it's lovely on that. The early-morning rubbish hunts, the hot chocolate, his nickname for her (Turtle), and the way he always explains everything except this one thing.

Children going missing is the mystery at the centre of this one, and Micah's grandfather disappears too. Her nana died before the story starts and Micah still misses her. The opening chapters are spooky rather than gory, but a child who worries about grown-ups vanishing may find it unsettling. For a reader who loves a shiver and a puzzle, it's perfect.

What to read next

If a big old house with a family secret is exactly their thing, The Haunting of Falcon House would make a brilliant next read. A boy travels alone to his family's great house in Saint Petersburg and sees another boy's face in the train window on the way.