Framed

Frank Cottrell Boyce's Framed is a funny crime story for 9 year olds, told by a boy who admits on page one that his family ended up in the art-theft business.

What happens

Dylan Hughes is the last boy left in Manod. It's a tiny town in Snowdonia at the end of a road that doesn't go anywhere, and one by one every other boy in his school has moved away with his family. Dylan is now down to penalties with nobody in goal.

The family business is the Snowdonia Oasis Auto Marvel, a garage at the dead end of the road. Dylan's job is the petrol log, a huge red car-boot-sale book he has quietly turned into a database. Who came in. What they drove. What crisps they bought. Ms Stannard eats Twix, since you ask.

The whole book is that log. Every chapter opens with a date, the cars in that day, the weather and a Note at the top like "BALACLAVAS ENCOURAGE CRIME". Then Dylan tells you what he remembers about that day.

It's a lovely way to read a story. You're getting it sideways, from a boy who thinks he's keeping business records.

And he is VERY funny without meaning to be. Every car comes with its top speed in brackets. A neighbour's tiny Daihatsu is "about the size of a marshmallow so you need tweezers to fix it".

The best bit early on is his dad pouring a kettle of boiling water into the Irish Sea so Dylan would get in for a swim. Dylan knew even then it couldn't work. He got in anyway. "He fixed the sea for us."

Then the garage starts running out of money. That part is handled gently but honestly. The family sell their own things at a car-boot sale to pay for a tank of petrol, and Dylan's little sister Minnie starts researching insurance fraud. If your child worries about money at home, that thread is worth being ready for. It's played for laughs, and the family stay a team throughout.

And then, on 6 April, a black BMW, a Nissan and two white vans go up the mountain road towards the old slate mine. They don't come back down. Minnie is certain it's an international criminal organisation.

If your reader likes a narrator who makes them laugh out loud while the mystery builds slowly underneath, they'll fall for this one.

What to read next

Another boy with quite a lot of explaining to do turns up in Cosmic. He's tall for his age, he lets some adults believe he's thirty, and by the time he starts telling you about it he is a very long way above the Lake District.