Friday Barnes 9 – No Escape

R. A. Spratt's No Escape is a very funny Friday Barnes mystery for 11 year olds that opens with its detective walking out of prison.

What happens

Friday Barnes is brilliant. She's also just spent eleven months in a juvenile detention centre, after someone in her study group used her criminology project for something terrible. She's been cleared, sort of. Now she's back at Highcrest Academy and she's sworn off solving mysteries for good.

She's going to translate The Iliad into rap instead. Her best friend Melanie isn't convinced.

Nobody else is either. Within minutes of arriving, Parker needs her to find his missing passport, and the answer involves a lot of stolen underpants. Then the school counsellor nods off halfway through Friday's session. It turns out it's happened every Tuesday for five weeks.

Friday can't help herself. You can almost see her brain waking back up, and it's a real pleasure to watch.

The jokes come thick and fast. Melanie can fall asleep anywhere and says the most sensible things by accident. Dr Belcredi, the headmaster, keeps handing out detentions to stop Melanie gossiping. Parker is hopeless and very sweet about it.

This is a later book in the series and it expects you to know the gang. Friday's parents, her Uncle Bernie and a boy called Ian all come with history, and there's a school trip to Italy on the cards.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Friday is fifteen here and it reads that way in places. There's crush talk and teasing about boyfriends, and the backstory of her arrest is a serious one. It's all handled lightly, with a joke never far away, but it sits at the older end of this shelf.

For a reader who loves a clever, awkward heroine and a proper puzzle, it's great fun. Friday doesn't do hugs or small talk, and she's much better at spotting a lie than a feeling (which makes her very easy to root for).

What to read next

If it's the deadpan silliness they love most, the same author wrote Nanny Piggins and the Runaway Lion, where a pig nanny and a ten-foot dancing bear superglue a smashed collection of ornaments into one giant monkey and hope nobody notices.