Moonlocket

Peter Bunzl's Moonlocket is the second Cogheart adventure, a Victorian chase story for 9 year olds that begins with a man breaking out of prison.

What happens

He plasters his white hair with mud from a puddle. He goes over the wire, up a drainpipe, across the gatehouse roof. He has spent a week bartering scraps of rope outside the oakum shed and knotting them into an escape kit, because a good knot, as he once taught his son, is the difference between life and death.

Then he pins a playing card to the jail door. The Jack of Diamonds.

Fifteen years inside and nobody has ever got out of that place before. He has, and he wants two things back. A diamond he hid long ago with his wife. And something else, which is where this stops being an adventure story and starts being personal.

Meanwhile Lily is lying in a cornfield with a crown of daisies on her flame-red hair, waiting for the morning mail airship to go over, and arguing with a clockwork fox about whether porridge counts as important.

Lily is carrying a lot. Her mother died in a steam-wagon crash when she was six. Last winter she was shot, and what brought her back was her papa's invention, so now there is clockwork ticking where her heart should be. She hates the word people use for someone like her. She would give a great deal to be ordinary.

That is the engine of the whole thing. A girl keeping an enormous secret, a boy called Robert with a past he does not know the shape of yet, and a very rude mechanical fox who is by some distance the best character in the book.

The world is a treat. Airships overhead on timetables, sixpences held up against the moon, hybrids and mechanicals treated as less than human by almost everybody. It is steampunk without ever stopping to explain itself, which is exactly right.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

It opens in a prison with a scarred, frightening man, and Lily's own history involves her mother's death and being shot by someone she trusted. That is all established in the first few pages rather than sprung later, and it is handled without gore. A child who finds menace exciting will be delighted. A more anxious reader might want the daytime version of this one.

What to read next

Start with the first Cogheart book if you can. It opens with Lily's father under attack in his airship, handing Malkin a letter and an escape pod, and everything Lily is carrying here begins right there.