The Elsewhere Emporium

The Elsewhere Emporium by Ross MacKenzie is a magic-shop adventure for 9 year olds, and it opens with a murder inquiry and a dinner guest who is already dead.

What happens

London, 1967. A house on Park Street that nobody ever goes in or out of. A small man in a crimson silk scarf stops outside, checks every brick, licks his finger after touching the door, and then lets himself in.

Inside it is all damp and dust until he reads a few lines out of a little black book. Then the lamps come on, the carpets are thick again, and a butler appears to ask whether there will be guests for dinner.

Two, as it turns out. There are three people at the table, but Mrs Hennypeck is dead and the dead do not eat. She is held in the world by a necklace and she is easily the loudest person in the room.

Three retired magical investigators have vanished in a fortnight. Mr Ivy thinks they were murdered. He wants Mrs Hennypeck back at work.

Then the book jumps to Keswick, now, and to Daniel Holmes, who owns a magic shop called the Nowhere Emporium and has just rebuilt the inside of it as an enormous carnival.

Tents in every direction. Toffee apples. A lion-taming room. A maze made of marshmallow, so if you get lost you eat your way out.

He has done all this without asking Ellie, whose father built the place and is not here any more, and he is absolutely terrified of what she will say.

Two things are worth knowing first.

The first is that this carries straight on from the earlier book. Daniel took the shop over six months ago, and the grief about Ellie's dad is already running underneath everything. A reader can follow the plot without that, but the feelings will go past them.

The second is the murders. Three people are gone and believed killed, and it is talked about at a dinner table rather than shown. Nothing in these opening chapters is gory. If your reader is fine with a detective story where somebody has died, they will be fine here.

What is lovely is how ordinary the magic is allowed to be. The butler deals with nesting moonghasts. A man loses a finger, is given a dose of something, grows it back, and complains it no longer does what he tells it.

Two stories, sixty years apart, and you can feel them heading for one another from the start.

What to read next

Start with the first Nowhere Emporium book if you possibly can. That is the one where Daniel wanders in off the street by accident and finds out what is behind the red curtain.