Ruby Redfort: Pick Your Poison

Lauren Child's Ruby Redfort: Pick Your Poison is a spy mystery for 9 year olds, and it's Ruby's fifth case for an agency she still isn't sure she trusts.

What happens

Ruby is thirteen. She cracks codes, collects telephones (the donut one was her first), and wears T-shirts that answer back before she has to. Today's says she's heard it all before.

She works for Spectrum, an outfit so secret that Ruby has no idea who actually runs it. She was told it's on the side of good and she took that at face value, which is starting to bother her.

Her minder Hitch pretends to be the family's household manager. Ruby's mum thinks he is simply the finest butler this side of the hemisphere. He also scales buildings and can get you onto a plane that has already started down the runway.

None of that is how the book opens, mind you. It opens with Ruby and her friend Del hiding under the lid of a dumpster behind a poker bar, having been chased halfway across town by a girl named Vapona Begwell.

The pleasure of these books is Ruby's mouth. She answers every phone with a made-up business ("Twinford Garbage Disposal, we depend on your trash") and talks a cold caller out of selling her life insurance on the grounds that she has no dependants, no income and no plans to die.

Her rules arrive through the story in capital letters, numbered, and she has a lot of them. Don't be surprised if they start quoting them.

Underneath the jokes she's rattled. She isn't sleeping. Four cases have been closed and she can't shake the feeling they're all connected, in a way she can't quite get hold of.

A couple of things to know before your reader starts. In the first chapter a girl swings a punch, misses, and breaks it on the nose of the friend standing next to her. And Ruby recaps, quite cheerfully, that a few weeks earlier she was pushed off the top of a hotel by a woman now sitting in a maximum security jail waiting for trial. That's backstory rather than something coming up, but it tells you the register. This is a thriller and people mean it.

It's American through and through. Twinford has sidewalks, fall leaves and a lot of bozo, jeepers and gotta. Most readers enjoy the swagger, though a child who reads slowly may need a run at it.

What to read next

Best to start at the beginning, though. Look Into My Eyes has Ruby at thirteen years' worth of nosiness and no job yet, perched at the bathroom window with binoculars, a banana milk and six hundred and twenty-two notebooks of other people's business.