Karma Moon – Ghost Hunter

Karma Moon - Ghost Hunter by Melissa Savage is a mystery for 10 year olds about a worrier who has to go and film a ghost.

What happens

Karma lives in apartment 4B on Charles Street with her dad, a very round pug called Alfred Hitchcock and a coffee table full of Noodle King cartons. She answers the phone for her dad's film company, which is really him and his two mates from school in the living room.

Then Netflix calls. Ten episodes. A haunted hotel up in the Colorado mountains. Her dad is so pleased he practically leaves the floor.

Karma looks the place up that night and can't finish her dinner.

Here's the thing about her. She calls her worries the what-ifs and they run on a loop. What if a bomb hits New York. What if the next lockdown drill isn't a drill. What if Mum never comes home. She sees a doctor about it on Wednesdays and mostly what they do is play Uno.

She also believes completely in fortune cookies, tarot cards, Snapple lids and a plastic fortune-telling globe called Crystal Mystic. Woo-woo isn't cuckoo, she says, and without it you'll have bad juju. The trouble is that none of it predicts what's coming, which is the only thing she actually wants from it.

So she goes anyway. She's Research, and nobody else can do her job. The hotel turns out to have had three managers in as many months, portraits of the owners climbing the grand staircase, and staff who have all seen something and won't quite say what.

It's much funnier than that makes it sound. Karma narrates fast and chatty, in lists and asides, and her dad is lovely with her. When she says she's having a heart attack he tells her he thinks she'll live, and then they breathe in together the way the doctor taught her.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

She packed five suitcases last summer and hasn't come back, and that's where the worst of the what-ifs started. It's the situation the book opens in rather than something that happens in front of you, but a child whose family has come apart will recognise it straight away. It's handled kindly and Karma and her dad are a proper team.

What to read next

If your reader knows exactly what it's like when your brain won't stop listing disasters, Better With Butter goes at the same thing from another angle. Marvel is scared of everything from earthquakes to being called on in class, and she calls her worries armour.