The Case of the Perilous Palace

Jordan Stratford's The Case of the Perilous Palace is a Wollstonecraft Detective Agency mystery for 9 year olds, and this time the client is a princess.

What happens

Things couldn't be worse for Lady Ada at the start. Her gran has moved in and shut the agency down. Her best friend Mary has been sent away, along with the maid and the tutor. Then Gran orders two footmen onto the roof with hatchets to cut Ada's beloved hot-air balloon loose. Ada calls it murder (she's not being dramatic, in her opinion).

And then a gleaming royal carriage pulls up outside.

It belongs to the governess of nine-year-old Princess Drina, who will one day be Queen Victoria. Drina is watched every second of the day. Every biscuit she eats is written down in a notebook. Her mum reads her diary every night. So Drina keeps her real thoughts somewhere else, in secret. And now that secret has gone missing.

Ada is the brains. She's clever, literal and completely unimpressed by anybody grand. She won't curtsy if she can help it and corrects a very important grown-up's vocabulary to his face. Mary is the one who notices how people feel and asks the right questions, and the two of them together are a joy.

There's so much fun in the language. Sir John Conroy keeps using the wrong long words, and the princess's parrot repeats them. Ada takes everything literally. When Gran says the governess plays her cards close, Ada points out that she wasn't playing cards!

It's a gentle sort of mystery. Nobody's in real danger in the opening chapters, and the villains are grown-ups who snoop and boss. What it's about, underneath, is how it feels when you're never allowed a single private thought. Who wouldn't be on Drina's side?

If you've got a reader who loves clever girls, long words and a bit of history, this is a treat. It helps to have met Ada and Mary before, but the story explains enough to follow along.

What to read next

For an earlier case with the same two girls, The Case of the Counterfeit Criminals starts with Ada stuck in bed being treated with leeches (quite a lot of leeches).