Space Detectives – Extra Weird Creatures

Mark Powers's Extra Weird Creatures is a daft space mystery for 9 year olds where people all over a space station wake up with extra body parts.

What happens

Felix Plum wakes up with a headache and a funny feeling in his shoulder. It turns out to be a second head. It's an exact copy of the first, right down to the mole, and both of them say everything at the same time.

His mum takes him straight to the Space Detectives. That's Connor and Ethan, two ten-year-olds from Earth spending the summer on Starville, a city floating under a giant glass dome above the planet.

They've been very bored lately (their last big case was some mouldy cheese in a fridge). Suddenly there's a queue outside their office door. A maths teacher with five extra arms, a three-legged architect, and a stray collie called Winston wagging three tails.

Then Ethan sprouts four new noses while sitting on a park bench. He has hay fever. You can imagine how he feels about that!

This is the kind of book that's silly on purpose, all the way through. There's a giant two-headed pigeon in a bowler hat who dreams of opening an antique shop. There's a pig in a laboratory who only wants to sing the blues. The boss of a giant company is a tiger in a suit.

The detective work is real, though. Connor plots every patient on a map and spots a pattern. The boys follow Winston around the shops to see where he's been eating. Your reader gets to put the clues together right alongside them.

The two boys are a great double act. Connor is tall, brainy and fiddles with his glasses when he's thinking. Ethan is short, bouncy and always hungry, and the jokes about his appetite keep coming ("Stop making a meal of this").

There are a few properly tense scrapes near the end. But it's all played for laughs, with a sneeze that has to be read to be believed.

If you've got a reader who loves a pun and a gross-out moment, this is going to be a hit. It's a later Space Detectives case, so the boys already have their own office by now.

What to read next

For how it all began, try the first Space Detectives book, where the boys are stuck selling ice cream on Ethan's uncle's stall and longing for a case to solve.