Read The French Confection free for 7 days. £7.99/month after - less than a paperback.
Anthony Horowitz's The French Confection is a very silly Paris caper for 9 year olds, and the whole thing kicks off with a strawberry yoghurt.
Nick Diamond is thirteen. His big brother Tim is a private detective, which would be fine if Tim were any good at it. He hasn't had a case in weeks, and the last one was a lost dog (he got bitten three times, twice by dogs).
Then Tim peels the lid off breakfast and finds he's won a weekend for two in Paris. Nick has to remind him who bought the yoghurt.
On the train, Tim tells everyone he's on a top-secret case for "Interplop". It's a total fib. But a jumpy steward overhears. At the station he stops them, whispers a warning about a "mad American" and pushes a little packet of sugar into Tim's hand.
Minutes later the steward is dead. Now two very nasty men want that sugar, and they don't believe for one second that the brothers are only on holiday. Who knew a sachet of sugar could cause so much trouble?
Cue a chase right across Paris. There's a flick knife hidden in a tiny statue, a jump off a bridge onto a tourist boat, and Tim going feet first through its glass roof into somebody's dinner (roast duck and all).
Nick tells the story, and it's like having the funniest boy in the class narrate an action film. Tim faints on the Eiffel Tower. He's crushed that the Channel Tunnel doesn't let him photograph the fish. Nick does all the actual thinking and gets very little thanks for it.
It's worth knowing this is a proper crime story under the giggles. The steward dies under a train early on (you hear the scream, you don't see it). The brothers are threatened with a knife, knocked out and tied to chairs. Then the villains slide back a wall onto a drug laboratory and force pills down both their throats. Nick is terrified and believes he's been given a deadly dose.
If your reader is unsettled by drugs or kidnapping, that scene might be one to read together. If they already love a crime caper with properly ugly baddies and a joke on every page, they'll be gripped.
It's the fifth Diamond Brothers book, though the Paris case is set up from scratch.
If this one goes down well, The Falcon's Malteser has more of Nick and Tim. They're flat broke in Fulham when a very nervous man pays them two hundred pounds to mind a rattling envelope and not open it.
A library hand-picked by an English teacher, delivered through a calm, ad-free app. If your child already loves reading, we keep up.
7-day free trial. Then £7.99/month.
