Skulduggery Pleasant – Death Bringer

Derek Landy's Death Bringer is a creepy, clever fantasy for 11 year olds about the end of the world, a murdered man in a park and a baby sister's christening.

What happens

It sits a long way into the Skulduggery Pleasant books and builds on everything before it. Anyone new to Skulduggery should start with the first one.

The best scene comes early. A journalist called Kenny finds the homeless man he's been interviewing dead in a Dublin park. At the police station he's questioned by a "Detective Inspector Me" and a teenage girl who's apparently on work experience. Your reader will know exactly who they are long before poor Kenny does.

Kenny's source had visions of the world ending. Now there are whispers of something called the Passage, and roughly a week to work out what it means.

Then Valkyrie dashes back for her little sister Alice's christening. She's nearly seventeen and completely soppy about the baby. She whispers to her that magic is real, that she might have it too, and that she never wants her getting hurt. Her aunt Beryl informs her she's holding Alice wrong. Her twin cousins want magic lessons and ask whether elves are real.

Those family scenes are what keep it so warm. Skulduggery is as dry as ever. Fletcher teleports in to steal her away from the party (and forgets that it's pouring where they're going).

Be warned, though, this one is properly creepy and some of it is cruel. The book opens on a girl strapped to a table with symbols carved into her skin, begging to be let go. Kenny's source is found with his throat cut. And at an old woman's cottage, three dead little girls climb out of a wooden box, moving in horrible stiff jerks.

That last bit is straight out of a horror film. A reader who's frightened of ghosts or creepy children might want to give it a miss for now. A confident reader who's loved the earlier books will find it gripping.

There's a lot going on underneath too. Some of the Necromancers think Valkyrie might be the Death Bringer they've been waiting for. Not all of them agree, and one of them is hiding a secret of his own.

What to read next

If the big-sister scenes were the bit they loved, The Hunger Games is in the library too. Katniss is sixteen, and she slips under the fence into the woods to hunt so there's food for her mum and her little sister Prim.