Murder Most Unladylike 8 – Top Marks for Murder

Robin Stevens's Top Marks For Murder is a boarding-school whodunnit for 11 year olds that starts with a girl looking out of her dorm window at exactly the wrong moment.

What happens

It's the eighth Wells and Wong case, and Hazel and Daisy are back at Deepdean for the school's big fiftieth Anniversary weekend. Parents are arriving from all over. There's a concert, a garden party, a play and a lot of fireworks being made in Science.

Hazel tells the story in her casebook, and she's noticed that things have changed. Daisy isn't the queen of the school any more. A glamorous new girl called Amina has the younger girls carrying her bag instead, and Daisy is in a proper sulk about it (quite a funny one).

Then, on the Friday morning, their dorm mate Beanie turns round from the window. She thinks she's just seen a man strangle a woman up on the wooded ridge opposite.

Is she right? Nobody's missing. There's no body. But Daisy is suddenly herself again, and the girls are off.

This is where it gets really fun. They pinch the parents' guest list from under a teacher's nose in History. They skip lunch to climb up to the ridge. Up there they find footprints, a French matchbox and a gold-edged card that makes them sure the pair were Anniversary guests. Which of the grown-ups walking through the gates is a murderer?

Hazel is lovely company. She's clever and careful and a bit braver than she used to be. You feel her worry for Daisy as well as the thrill of the case. The dorm scenes are brilliant too, full of gingernuts, crushes and squabbles. Lavinia would like to be left alone about her tennis, thank you very much!

It helps to know it sits right at the top of the shelf. The whole case begins with Beanie sure she's watched a woman being choked, and she's frightened out of her wits. Lavinia's parents are divorcing and hate each other, and there's some chat about boys and growing up. If your reader's happy with a proper murder mystery, it's pitched just right.

Anyone who likes to guess the culprit before the detectives do will have a great time. It works best if they've met these girls before, though.

What to read next

To start where Daisy and Hazel's cases began, try Murder Most Unladylike. It's their very first real murder, and it's Hazel, not Daisy, who finds the body of the Science mistress.