Skulduggery Pleasant – Resurrection

Derek Landy's Resurrection is a dark, funny fantasy for 11 year olds that brings a skeleton detective and his old partner back together after five long years apart.

What happens

It's set years after the earlier Skulduggery Pleasant books, and it gives away how they end. So a reader who's new to Skulduggery should go back to the very first book.

Valkyrie Cain is twenty-four now. She's spent five years alone on a farm in Colorado with her dog, Xena, and she's only just come home to Ireland. She isn't doing well. She trains hard and zaps tin cans with lightning, but she can barely face her own family. Then Skulduggery pulls up in the Bentley and asks for twenty-four hours.

A friend of theirs, Temper Fray, has vanished while working undercover. Skulduggery needs somebody nobody would ever suspect to help find out why.

Enter Omen Darkly. His twin brother Auger is the Chosen One, the subject of an actual prophecy, and good at absolutely everything. Omen is the other twin. He forgets to check his timetable, can't keep his shirt tucked in, and insists he isn't jealous at all (he's mostly telling the truth).

Omen's chapters are the best thing in it. Haven't we all felt like the one nobody notices? The bickering in the car is lovely too. Skulduggery points out that Xena is the only dog ever allowed in his Bentley, and Valkyrie reminds him she can't go a whole day without being fed.

Be ready for some very grim moments, though. The first chapter is a gang of killers hunting Temper through the streets. One of them snaps a stranger's neck just for being there, and their masked leader orders a baby to be killed, then shoots one of his own gang when she refuses. Valkyrie's own chapters are full of dark thoughts. She's sure she's going to die on her knees, and that she deserves horrible things. There's some swearing as well.

That makes it a book for a reader at the very top of this shelf who has already grown up with the series. For a younger or more sensitive child, it's too much for now.

What to read next

If Omen is the one they warm to, the boy who gets everyone else's leftovers, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is in the library too. Harry sleeps in a cupboard under the stairs, wears his cousin Dudley's old clothes and watches him count thirty-six birthday presents.