The Arctic Railway Assassin

The Arctic Railway Assassin by M. G. Leonard & Sam Sedgman is a train mystery for 10 year olds that heads north into the Arctic winter.

What happens

Hal is flying to Stockholm on his own for a long weekend with his Uncle Nat. The plan is a sleeper train into the Arctic Circle to see the Northern Lights. But Uncle Nat has asked him to bring a box of Yorkshire Gold tea bags, and Hal knows exactly what that means. Something's wrong.

He's right. Nat's old friend Morti has just won a Nobel Prize for medicine. Since then her flat has been burgled (and nothing taken), her lab window keeps unlocking itself and her suitcase arrived slashed. Her husband is in prison for trying to build a deadly sound weapon called the Kill Code.

Then, the morning they're due to travel, Morti disappears. All she leaves is a note and the keys to her cabin.

Hal is thirteen and he works things out by drawing. He sketches everyone he sees, from a pickpocket at the Christmas market to a whole travelling orchestra waiting on the station benches. It's a brilliant way into a mystery, because your reader ends up noticing the same little details Hal does. (A man on the plane with a strangely flat ear, anyone?)

There's so much Sweden in it too. Cinnamon buns, a metro station that looks like a cave, and a sky that's already dark at three in the afternoon. Uncle Nat is full of facts about Sámi reindeer herders and the gruesome history of the market square (which Hal enjoys far more than he probably should).

This isn't the pair's first adventure. Hal remembers crossing America with his uncle on the California Comet. But everything your reader needs is explained as they go, and the chilly, someone-is-watching feeling builds nicely from the very first page.

What to read next

If they'd like to go back to where Hal and Uncle Nat first got to know each other, it's The Highland Falcon Thief, on the last journey of a royal steam train through Scotland.