Neil Flambé and the Bard’s Banquet

Kevin Sylvester's Neil Flambé and the Bard's Banquet is a cooking mystery for 10 year olds about a jar of Victorian honey with a note sealed inside it.

What happens

Neil is a chef. A very good one, and he will tell you so himself. He runs his own restaurant with his cousin Larry doing the chopping and most of the talking.

An English lord turns up with a case of honey dug out of a demolished London factory and asks Neil to cook a meal around it. Larry holds one of the jars to the light and spots a roll of paper inside. One word on it looks like help.

Neil's reaction is to bang his head with a frying pan. He's just got home from an adventure that nearly killed all of them and he would very much like to stay in his kitchen this time.

He cooks the dinner anyway, because Larry has already taken the deposit.

What happens at that dinner is the good bit. Lord Lane keeps quoting Shakespeare at Neil, who has never read any Shakespeare and doesn't like being made to feel stupid in his own restaurant. A photographer is taking pictures through the window. And in the kitchen, Gary drops a jar and comes up a half cup of honey short, which means Neil has to open the one jar he swore he'd leave shut.

After that the trail goes to London, and it's a proper puzzle. A key drawn on a sticky page. A poem about Drake and a stolen jewel. A column of tiny letters that has to be a code.

The cooking is real, by the way. You get how Neil thinks about a dish, why one glob of honey out of place ruins the balance, and there's a scone recipe at the front with instructions for the cream.

Now, a caution, and it matters more than the mystery does. Neil is fifteen. He has a girlfriend and they kiss. His friend Isabella spends this book with her arm in a sling because she was shot in the last one, which gets mentioned in passing like a sprained ankle. The writing itself is squarely for a younger reader, all short chapters and dreadful puns, but the cast are teenagers living a fairly dangerous life and a ten year old is being asked to look up at them.

This one also sits well into the series and keeps looking back.

What to read next

If they want the adventure everyone keeps referring to, the Tokyo Treasure is stocked here as well. Larry has moved to Japan to draw a manga comic and Neil is short a sous-chef.