Samantha Sutton and the Winter of the Warrior Queen

Jordan Jacobs's Samantha Sutton and the Winter of the Warrior Queen is an archaeology adventure for 9 year olds about a girl who is very good at noticing things and very bad at staying out of trouble.

What happens

It opens in the dark. Samantha steps off a train at Swindon with snow soaking through her jeans and forty miles still to go, most of it at a run.

Something heavy is pressing out through the canvas of her backpack. Big ears. A strong brow. A sharp nose.

Men outside a pub stare at it. Two police officers stop her. Then a voice she knows shouts down the road for somebody to grab her.

And then the story jumps back to November, and you spend the rest of the book working out how she got there.

Samantha is twelve and small for her age, and she writes everything in a notebook she wears round her neck. Her uncle Jay is an archaeologist who takes risks, and the last dig she went on with him ended badly enough that she is not sure she wants anything more to do with the subject.

Then he turns up in California with a Union Jack backpack and a project in Cambridge.

The dig is a bare field on a low rise called Wardy Hill, with a concrete war bunker beside it for a lab. No temple, no stone circle, no secret door. Just phosphate maps and a scatter of surface finds.

Honestly, that is the best thing about it. Your reader gets a real sense of what archaeology actually is. Slow, careful, and far more interested in where a thing was lying than what it would sell for.

That argument is at the centre of the book. Samantha meets a father and son out on the same field with a metal detector, keeping whatever they dig up, entirely legally, and her brother nearly explodes.

There is plenty of atmosphere too. Creaking stairs in an old Cambridge college. A skeleton in a glass case displayed alongside the bones of the mice that got into her coffin. A torch pointed up at Samantha's window at night and switched off in a hurry.

A threat runs all the way through it, and it is worth being ready for. A student from the last dig was badly hurt and left with a scar across his throat and jaw, Samantha blames herself, and she is frightened of him from the first page. If your reader enjoys being chased, that is the engine of the whole book. If they don't, this one never lets up.

What to read next

For another girl carrying something ancient she cannot explain, try Secrets of a Sun King. Lil is in London in 1922 when a parcel arrives from an Egyptologist who died that same morning.