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Anthony Horowitz's I Know What You Did Last Wednesday is a murder mystery for 9 year olds that's every bit as silly as it is spooky.
Nick Diamond is fourteen and stuck with his big brother Tim for the summer holidays. Tim is a private detective. He's also hopeless at it (his last job ended when he saved an ambassador from a bomb that wasn't there by throwing him in front of a bus).
Then a very posh envelope arrives. Rory McDougal, a millionaire Tim went to school with, is holding a reunion on his own island off Scotland. He'll even pay Tim a thousand pounds to come.
Nick doesn't like the sound of that. Why would anybody pay so much to see Tim again? So he goes too.
An old fishing boat drops the guests on Crocodile Island and won't be back for a couple of days. There's no host to greet them. There's no phone in any room and no signal either. Then they find Rory.
From there it's a proper whodunnit. The guests all went to school together, nobody can leave and they start dropping one by one. So which old classmate is doing it?
It's Nick telling the story, and he's very funny. Tim hears a scream and decides it's Mozart. He searches inside the grandfather clocks (for somebody's grandfather, presumably). And when they find Rory, he faints.
Meanwhile Nick does the actual detecting. He spots the missing telephones and the twist of silver paper on a bedroom floor. If your reader enjoys working things out before the adults do, they'll love that.
One thing to know before you hand it over. The body count is HIGH and it climbs quickly. Rory is killed with a sword in a room covered in blood. After that guests are poisoned, stabbed and flattened, and a grinning skull face appears at a bedroom window in the dark.
Every death is a joke as much as a fright (one victim is stabbed with a model of the Eiffel Tower) and the descriptions are short. Even so, a child who's easily spooked may find it too much before bed. One who loves a gruesome joke and a puzzle to chew on will probably be gripped.
This is the sixth Diamond Brothers book. Nick mentions a few earlier scrapes, but this case works fine on its own.
If they enjoy this one, The Falcon's Malteser is where Nick explains how he ended up living with Tim. Expect a nervous stranger, a mysterious package and plenty more of Tim getting it all wrong.
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