Mystery of the Night Watchers

A. M. Howell's Mystery of the Night Watchers is a historical mystery for 9 year olds about a girl who suddenly discovers a grandfather nobody ever mentioned.

What happens

It's May 1910 and Halley's comet is on its way. Some newspapers say its tail is full of poison gas, and people are buying anti-comet pills (really!). Nancy's mother has been acting very oddly all week.

Then one school morning she marches Nancy and her little sister Violet straight past the school turning and onto a train. They're going to Suffolk, to stay with a grandfather Nancy was told had died years ago.

Grandfather is an apothecary with a shop full of soaps and remedies, but nobody ever comes in. The house has oil lamps instead of electric lights, a landing crammed with pots of herbs and a little rooftop observatory. And there are rules. Stay inside. Don't be seen. Keep out of the cupola.

Who wouldn't want to break at least one of those?

Nancy is lovely company. She's twelve, sensible and very fond of fairness (she's been fretting about two hungry boys in her father's court case). She's also just realised that grown-ups tell lies, which is a very big thing to find out in one day.

The clues build up quietly. Whispering from the top of the house at dawn. An attic nursery with a cot and a pillow embroidered with Nancy's own name. A tall boy delivering groceries who spots her hiding in the hallway. You can feel her trying to fit it all together, and your reader will be trying right alongside her.

There's lots of real history woven in without it ever feeling like a lesson. Handkerchiefs sewn for the women's suffrage campaign, hobble skirts, a king who has just died and a whole country nervous about a comet.

It's a slower, thoughtful sort of mystery. If you've got a reader who loves atmosphere and family secrets more than chases and explosions, this one's for them.

What to read next

If this one goes down well, The House of One Hundred Clocks is by the same author. Helena and her parrot Orbit arrive at a Cambridge house full of chiming clocks, where her father has been hired to look after every one of them.