The Goldfish Boy

Lisa Thompson's The Goldfish Boy is a whodunnit for 9 year olds whose detective has not been outside in weeks.

What happens

Matthew watches Chestnut Close from the window of the spare room and writes down what he sees with the time beside it. Mr Charles deadheading his roses. Penny and Gordon setting off for the weekly shop. Melody Bird towing a very reluctant dachshund towards the graveyard. Old Nina watering three pots on her step at ten o'clock, every morning.

He knows everybody's day by heart. Which is how he knows the shiny black car is wrong.

It brings Mr Charles's grandchildren, Casey and Teddy, aged six and fifteen months, who have never met him. Their mother leaves them for a month. Within a day the tidy lawn is under a freak rainfall of buckets and spades, and Matthew is watching a toddler scoop a dead chick out of a flower bed.

Then Teddy goes into the pond. Matthew, who sees everything, is the only person who sees it, and he cannot go outside.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Matthew's OCD is not a quirk, it is the whole texture of the book. He washes his hands eleven times and it is still not right. The secret box under his bed turns out to be disposable gloves, thirty two left, supplied by his mother on the condition that he stops scrubbing his skin with bleach. His hands are cracked and bleeding and he puts them behind his back so she cannot look. And the reason the spare room holds an unused cot and shopping bags nobody ever unpacked is a baby brother who died five years ago, which Matthew believes was his doing. All of that is in the opening chapters, so it is not a spoiler, it is the ground the book stands on.

A lot of what makes it so good is how ordinary Matthew sounds about all of it. He talks to a patch of wallpaper that looks like a gummy lion. He describes the guilt as a beetle scuttling about in his stomach. His dad has bought a pool table and asks him for a game every single day.

The neighbours are the other pleasure. Penny and Gordon go everywhere as though tied at the waist with invisible string. Mr Charles is all charm at the gate and something quite different when he thinks nobody is watching, and when he throws a bowl of water over the cat, Matthew sees that too.

It suits a confident reader rather than one who has just got going.

What to read next

Melody Bird, the girl with the dachshund, gets her own book afterwards. The Graveyard Riddle takes her through a gap in a crumbling wall into the oldest corner of that graveyard, where there is a cottage nobody has ever mentioned to her. It is another step up in age.