Skulduggery Pleasant – Bedlam

Derek Landy's Skulduggery Pleasant - Bedlam is a fast, funny and very dark fantasy for 11 year olds, and it's one for readers who already know this skeleton detective well.

What happens

This is the twelfth Skulduggery Pleasant book, so a lot has happened before page one. Valkyrie Cain is now twenty-five. She's a detective alongside Skulduggery, a walking, wisecracking skeleton in a sharp three-piece suit. And she's carrying a terrible guilt about her little sister, Alice, whose soul was damaged in an earlier book. Valkyrie will do anything to put that right.

Meanwhile the city of Roarhaven is getting stranger. Little squares of paper carrying jolts of magic, called Splashes, are being passed around in bars. The villain Abyssinia has a big plan, and it starts in less than two weeks. And fifteen-year-old Omen Darkly, who isn't very good at magic and is always late, might be the one who has to stop it.

The chapters jump between Valkyrie, Omen and the villains. Omen's bits are the funniest. He's worrying about school subjects and his friend's new boyfriend while the world gets more dangerous around him. Skulduggery gets all the best lines too ("You've got a serious case of humanity. I'm afraid there's no cure").

Worth knowing before you hand it over

This series has grown up with its heroine, and by this book it reads much older than this shelf. Valkyrie is a grown woman with a short temper and a lot of anxiety to work through. There are fights with guns and fireballs. One villain, Razzia, is cheerfully looking forward to killing again, and another character has been tortured for ninety years. The Splashes are handled a lot like drugs. Parts of it are sad too, like Valkyrie's small sister telling her that her hamster has died.

For a confident older reader who has come all the way through the series, that's the point. It's darker because they've grown up with it. For a younger reader, or one who is new to Skulduggery, this is not the place to start.

What to read next

Starting at the beginning is much the better idea, and the first nine Skulduggery Pleasant books are in the library together. They open with a girl at her uncle's funeral, and a mysterious man in a buttoned-up coat and scarf watching from under a tree.