Mouse Heart

Fleur Hitchcock's Mouse Heart is a twisty murder mystery for 11 year olds set in a tumbledown theatre beside the docks.

What happens

Mouse was found as a newborn in a costume hamper, wrapped in a velvet dress and sharing it with field mice. The actors of the Moth Theatre brought her up. Walter was only twelve at the time, and he's the one who named her.

So when Walter bursts in one morning with blood all over his hands, crying that he didn't do it, Mouse doesn't believe for one second that he's a killer. A woman has been stabbed on the quayside. The queen's men drag Walter off to prison anyway.

Mouse decides she'll prove he's innocent herself. She's small and quick, she can fence and she's very good at pretending to be someone else. Dressed as an errand boy, she carries a letter across the city and stands outside the prison shouting for Walter.

She tells the story herself, in the present tense, and it moves fast. You feel her panic in the costume store as a man jabs his sword into the hampers (one of them has Walter in it!).

The theatre crowd are brilliant company. There's grand, dithering Mr Hawkin, dazzling Valentina with her sword and her perfume, vain Ambrose and spiteful little Eve. There's Kwadwo too, who paints the scenery and cooks, and who has to stay hidden from the captain who brought him here as a child.

Mouse's jokes are very dry. The company loves a murder play, she explains, and she quite often gets murdered (on stage, anyway).

This one isn't gentle. It opens with a stabbing in the dark, and there's a lot of blood on Walter's hands. The prison is grim, with hands grabbing through the bars. Kwadwo's story of being taken from his home is told plainly.

If your reader is jumpy about murder and blood, they may find it too much. But if they like a mystery with real danger in it and a hero who's small, brave and stubborn, it's a cracking read. Who in that theatre can Mouse really trust?

What to read next

If this one hits the spot, try The Boy Who Flew, another Fleur Hitchcock story set in a crowded old city. Athan is building a flying machine with his friend Mr Chen, until a murder leaves him guarding it from the wrong hands.