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Adele Whitby's Kate's Story, 1914 is a big-house mystery for 8 year olds, narrated by a girl eight days off her twelfth birthday.
Kate Vandermeer lives at Vandermeer Manor, up on the Rhode Island cliffs. Seventy-five rooms, four wings, five floors, eight gardens. Her mother would rather like her to start behaving like a Vandermeer, and to stop reading ghost stories aloud while her maid does her hair.
On her birthday Kate will be given the Katherine necklace. Half a golden heart, set with rubies, passed to every Katherine in the family since her great-grandmother got it at twelve.
The other half is sapphire and it belongs to Beth, her English cousin, who is crossing the Atlantic to be there. The two girls know each other only from letters.
Beth arrives with a battered journal in her luggage. It is sixty years old. It belonged to Essie Bridges, lady's maid to the original twins, and Essie wrote about her girls in code names.
The code names do not add up. Sparrow tied a red ribbon into Katherine's hair. But Lark was the one who got the sapphires. So which twin was which, and why would a maid need code names at all?
It is a proper puzzle and it is laid out fairly. Your reader gets the journal pages as the girls get them.
There is as much house here as mystery, and honestly that is half the appeal. Footmen. A dessert cart. Cucumber sandwiches and madeleines and little cakes with a strawberry on top. A butler whose glasses are not strong enough to see that one of his footmen is shaking.
Kate is good company too. She speaks up at a garden party when the ladies vote to keep the suffragettes out of the Fourth of July parade, and she is patted on the head for it in front of everybody. It is a small scene and it does a lot of work.
One thing to flag. This story leans on something that happened to Beth in England the month before, a missing locket and a maid who got blamed for it, and that is told elsewhere. Kate sums it up in a few sentences so nothing is actually lost. It does read like the second half of a pair, though, and the other half is not here.
If a girl in a grand old house working out what the grown-ups are hiding sounds right, Robin Stevens sends one into a manor on purpose in The Ministry of Unladylike Activity. May Wong turns up as an evacuee with orders to watch the owner.
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