Libby and the Highland Heist

Jo Clarke's Libby and the Highland Heist is a snowy mystery for 10 year olds about a Christmas holiday in a huge old Scottish house where the paintings keep disappearing.

What happens

Libby and her best friend Connie take the sleeper train north with Libby's aunt (who snores, apparently VERY loudly). Libby was expecting the countryside to be boring. Instead, Connie's home has four towers, a suit of armour on the landing and portraits on every wall.

But something isn't right. Connie's dad stays shut away in his study. Her mum is tired and snappy. And there are faded patches on the walls where paintings used to hang.

Nobody will say where they've gone. Then Libby overhears that Connie might not be going back to school next term, and suddenly it's personal.

Of course Libby can't leave it alone. During a game of hide and seek she pokes a carved face in the wall and finds a secret room. Someone has rigged it up to wail like a ghost. Who'd go to all that trouble unless there was something to hide?

It's a lovely mix of cosy and creepy. There are tattie scones, square sausages, hot chocolate piled with cream and a Christmas tree fetched from the family's own forest. There are also power cuts, footsteps on the landing and torchlight moving about at night.

And Connie is a brilliant best friend. She teases Libby about reading too many mysteries, then wriggles through the gap in the wall right behind her.

There's one properly scary moment. Libby feels a shove in the dark and wakes up at the bottom of the stairs with a sore ankle. Everyone thinks she slipped. She's sure she didn't. It isn't graphic, but a nervous reader might want to know it's coming.

This is the girls' second adventure, after their first term together in Paris. If you've got a reader who loves secret passages, snowed-in houses and a mystery they can try to solve before Libby does, this will go down a treat.

What to read next

To see how the two of them met, go back to Libby and the Parisian Puzzle. Libby takes the train to Paris on her own to join her aunt's travelling school, and a nervous woman clutching a red suitcase has her curious before they even reach the tunnel.