Read Spectre Collectors: Rise of the Ghostfather! free in the Little Reads app.
Barry Hutchison's Rise of the Ghostfather is the third Spectre Collectors adventure for 10 year olds, and it's packed with ghosts, green slime and some truly terrible police work.
Denzel and his best friend Smithy work for the Spectre Collectors, a centuries-old secret society that catches ghosts. Smithy happens to be a ghost himself. So the two of them have talked everyone into giving captured ghosts a fair hearing before they're locked away.
Their first interview doesn't go brilliantly. Smithy plays Bad Cop in sunglasses and a homemade badge, and the questions are "Are you a good ghost?" and "Are you a bad ghost?" (the headless Elizabethan says yes, then no, and that's apparently that). Then Denzel reads out the ghost's full name, and it turns inside out into a slimy blob with far too many mouths.
Next door is Tabatha, a ghost girl with a folding cane topped by a little golden fist. She says she saves the world every Tuesday. Smithy falls head over heels on the spot, and his lovestruck "HAHAHAHAHA! YES!" is one of the funniest running jokes in the book.
Meanwhile someone keeps whispering "He is coming", and the same words turn up carved in an ancient language on a cave wall in Scotland. So the team go north through a magic tunnel (Denzel is sick twice), into four different kinds of rain and down under a hillside. And the ghost behind it all, the Ghostfather, is on his way back. It's Denzel he's after.
The humour is very silly and very quick. Smithy gets most of the laughs, whether he's reciting "Och! Hoots! Haggis!" in a dreadful accent or getting overexcited about a big rock. Underneath there's real warmth too, as Denzel keeps insisting that being a ghost doesn't automatically make you bad.
It gets properly spooky in places. Friends are snatched straight through walls, a chanting crowd in dark-red robes waits in a cave, and at one point the slime monster has Denzel's whole head in its hand. A reader who likes shivers mixed in with the jokes will love it.
It's the last of the three and it leans on what's gone before, so start with Too Ghoul for School if Denzel is new to your reader.
Fancy more of Barry Hutchison's monster mayhem? Try The Swivel-Eyed Ogre-Thing, where Ben, tiny Paradise and a failed trainee wizard called Wesley end up on a rooftop hiding from a very angry goat.
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