The Arrowhead Moor Adventure

Fleur Hitchcock's The Arrowhead Moor Adventure is a bike-powered mystery for 9 year olds, and it starts the Clifftoppers series with four cousins, one dog and a VERY suspicious woman in red high heels.

What happens

Ava, Aiden, Chloe and Josh are at their grandparents' farm above Drake's Bay for the Easter holidays. Grandma hands over a picnic and tells them not to come back until the sun's going down. (She's got a visiting film society to deal with, and they're very boring, apparently.)

On the way to a grand old house and gardens, a red sports car nearly flattens Bella the dog. The driver shouts at THEM. Then the same woman keeps turning up. She hangs a heavy black holdall on a tree in the middle of nowhere. When Josh kindly tries to give it back, she isn't one bit grateful.

Who leaves a bag in a tree? The cousins follow her trail across the moor, from an old red phone box to a stone circle and a dark Bronze Age tomb. What turns up there (and later, inside a hollowed-out book) is a lot more than a lost bag.

The story hops between the four of them, so you get a bit of each. Josh is eight (nearly nine, he'd like you to know) and writes down number plates in his little red notebook. Aiden reads the map and is forever wiping his glasses. Chloe is cycling in flip-flops with a blister and keeps saying they should ring the police. Ava is twelve, mostly in charge and says "oh my god" a LOT.

It's properly funny between the tense bits. Hiding in the dark, Aiden finds a snail in his hair while two men come for the bag a few feet away. And Josh is permanently starving, whatever is going on.

It's worth saying the cousins make some bold choices. They're out on their own all day, they follow strangers, and two of them race down off the moor far too fast. Most kids would love that kind of freedom, and it might start a chat about what your reader would actually do.

If you've got a reader who likes piecing a mystery together alongside the characters, this is a great one.

What to read next

If this one goes down well, the four cousins are back at the farm in The Fire Bay Adventure, the next Clifftoppers book. This time there's a village fire festival, a huge bonfire on the beach and a man at the market selling headsets that seem suspiciously cheap.