Hacker

Malorie Blackman's Hacker is a computer mystery for 9 year olds about a girl who goes looking for a thief the police have already stopped looking for.

What happens

Vicky Gibson finishes her maths exam in half an hour. She is very pleased with herself for about ninety seconds.

Then Mrs Bracken marches her out of the hall. Somebody has broken into the file holding the exam answers on a school computer and left a message signed Hacker Supreme. Everyone has decided it was Vicky. She is the one who is good with computers, so who else would it be?

She walks home braced for the worst row of her life. Her mum is waiting in the hall with something much worse. Dad has been arrested. More than a million pounds has appeared in his own account at Universal Bank, where he is the computer auditing manager.

Vicky knows he did not put it there. She also knows something nobody has thought to ask her. Dad taught her how the bank's system works, and he always says you cannot touch anything on it without leaving a trace somewhere.

So at two in the morning she creeps downstairs to his computer.

Vicky tells the whole thing herself, which is most of the fun. You get her showing off, then panicking, then pretending she is not panicking. Her running commentary on her brother Gib is properly funny. Right up until it isn't.

Because this one goes somewhere tender. Vicky was adopted as a baby. In the middle of a shouting match Gib tells her nobody likes her and her own parents drowned to get away from her. She cries herself to sleep holding the only photograph she has of them. That happens early on, not as a late twist.

The other thing to say is who is telling the story. Vicky is in Year 9. So this is secondary school, exam halls, a mum six months pregnant who has been told not to get upset, and a dad in a police cell overnight. The sentences are short and the pace is quick, but the worries belong to an older child than the shelf suggests.

For a reader who enjoys knowing more than the grown-ups do, that is quite a lot of the appeal.

What to read next

If the part they love is a child working a case the adults have already closed, try Half Moon Investigations. Fletcher Moon is twelve, holds a detective qualification he got over the internet, and spends the book trying to prove he did not do something he has been framed for.