The Good Thieves

Katherine Rundell's The Good Thieves is a 1920s heist for 10 year olds about a girl who has crossed the Atlantic to steal her grandfather's home back.

What happens

Vita stands alone on the deck in a storm while every sensible passenger is below, and sees New York come out of the mist. A seagull is bullying a crow overhead. She takes a marble out of her pocket, works out the angle, and knocks the seagull off course.

That's her, in one paragraph. Small, still, watchful, and a frighteningly good shot.

Her grandfather Jack has lost everything. A New York millionaire called Victor Sorrotore offered to rent his old castle and then simply took it, with a fake deed of sale, two hundred dollars appearing in an account and a man with a gun at the gate. No lawyer will touch it without money Jack doesn't have.

So Vita gets a cab on her own, walks into Sorrotore's party, and tells him to his face that he's a thief.

She also comes away with something better than an argument. There's an emerald the size of a lion's eye still hidden at the castle, and if she can get it out, she can buy a lawyer.

She writes THE PLAN in a red notebook and underlines it.

The pleasure of reading this is the sentences. Rundell writes a party as a kaleidoscope, a mother as a warship, a grandfather who "seemed to spark electricity when he talked". Your reader will meet a boy who throws himself out of a third-floor window of Carnegie Hall and lands on a mattress his friend has dragged round the corner, and a maid lifting watches off wrists with the face of a trapped animal. Nothing here is only scenery.

Vita had polio when she was five. Her left foot turns in and hurts constantly and she never mentions the pain to anyone. What she does mention, with real fury, is the way strangers look at her ankle and go soft-eyed with pity. It's written from the inside, and it's one of the best things here.

Now the honest part. This is a book with menace in it. A guard dog bites her grandfather hard enough to draw blood. A rifle gets levelled at his chest. Her grandmother died before the story starts and the grief is on the page, and so is her father, killed in the Great War when she was five. Sorrotore is genuinely chilling, right down to his bitten, bloody fingernails and the tortoises he has had jewels set into.

Nobody is hurt in front of you. But it's tense, and it's for a reader who enjoys being a bit frightened.

What to read next

For another girl who flatly refuses the story adults have agreed on, try Sophie in Rooftoppers. She was found floating in a cello case after a shipwreck, everyone has told her she's an orphan, and she is quite certain they're wrong.