Iggy Peck and the Mysterious Mansion

Andrea Beaty's Iggy Peck and the Mysterious Mansion is a spooky-house mystery for 6 year olds who love knowing how things are built.

What happens

Iggy Peck thinks about architecture all the time. He designs a Victorian mansion for an oak tree. He once built a tower out of nappies.

Chasing his cat into the woods in a thunderstorm, he trips over three stone cats, finds two graves nobody talks about, and ends up on the porch of the empty house everyone in town calls the Mysterious Mansion.

His friend Ada's great-aunt Bernice has just inherited it, which she is delighted about until she sees the state of the roof.

The house is extraordinary. There's a mosaic floor with a slogan spelled out in it, and upstairs a room for every country the old owner ever visited, painted wall to wall. Egypt, Spain, Italy, Russia, China, Morocco. Who wouldn't open every door in that corridor?

There is also no furniture, no working electricity and no money to fix any of it. A developer wants to knock the lot down and put up ten identical blocks of flats, which Iggy takes personally.

And the house does things. The porch boards buck like piano keys. Doors open on their own. Somewhere inside, something plays music.

What's fun here is watching four children treat a haunted house as a problem to be solved. Rosie looks under the porch for gears. Ada wants an experiment. Sofia goes to the city hall and comes back with the building permits.

Iggy just wants everyone to look at the wallpaper properly.

The jokes are broad and land well at this age. There's a letter from a firm of solicitors that runs to about nine postscripts and gets sillier with each one.

Do know that the sad bit is real and it isn't hidden. Roughly halfway in, the children find newspaper pages about the 1918 flu, and read that the owner's wife and his seven year old daughter both died of it within a month of each other. It's two short articles, no detail, but it names a child's death plainly and it's the reason the whole mystery exists.

A child who worries about illness might want you nearby for that page. A child who likes a proper reason behind the spooky stuff will find it makes the house sadder and much more interesting.

Fair warning on the scary side too. Lightning, a howl in the dark, and a figure coming out of a doorway before anyone can see what it is.

What to read next

There's more of this gang in Ada Twist and the Disappearing Dogs, which is in the library too. Pets start vanishing all over the same town, Ada refuses to jump to conclusions, and she insists on doing it properly with a hypothesis.