Read Loot: How to steal a fortune free for 7 days. £7.99/month after - less than a paperback.
Loot: How to steal a fortune by Jude Watson is a jewel thief caper for 10 year olds that opens with a child waiting under a hotel roof for his father to throw down the diamonds.
March McQuin is waiting in a hotel courtyard in Amsterdam at three in the morning. His job is the getaway. Somebody has nicked his getaway bike, so he picks the combination lock on another one, because his dad taught him that too.
Up on the roof, his dad has the diamonds.
Alfie McQuin is a world famous cat burglar, and most of what March knows about anything he learned from him. Never trust a guy who says trust me. The right prop can save a shaky cover story. Timing is everything.
What Alfie throws down off that roof is one small stone. Then he falls.
His last words are instructions, and none of them make sense. Wait a month. Find jewels. Stick, rag. Follow the falls. March runs, because you see a uniform and you scram, and within a block he knows somebody is following him who is very, very good at it.
Jewels turns out not to be jewels. It's Jules, a twin sister, thirteen next birthday, who found out who her father was about a month ago and isn't especially impressed by him.
Alfie's death is on the page and the book does not look away from it. There's the sound of the landing, the blood pooling on the stones, the blood coming out of his mouth, and March holding his hand while it shakes. That is a lot of detail for a younger reader, and a child who worries about losing a parent may find the opening genuinely upsetting. It's worth reading those pages yourself first.
What follows is much more of a caper. March and Jules are handcuffed into a system of officials and forms and a group home, and they start planning their way out of it. Between the two of them, they were taught the whole trade.
The writing is quick and clipped and full of Alfie's rules dropped in like captions, and there's a lot of dry comedy in two strangers discovering they're twins over a hand of cards on a plane. If your reader can take the opening, the rest is a proper heist with actual stakes.
For the same planning brain in a much sunnier setting, The Great Greene Heist is a boy assembling a crew of school specialists to stop a bully buying an election.
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