The Graveyard Riddle

Lisa Thompson's The Graveyard Riddle is a quiet, creeping mystery for 11 year olds that starts with a dog taking a different path.

What happens

Melody walks Frankie the dachshund round the graveyard every day after school. Other people think that is odd. She thinks it is the best place in town, full of light and birds and nobody arguing.

One afternoon she takes the overgrown path into the oldest part, the bit where the mourners are dead themselves now. A bramble draws blood on her ankle. Frankie disappears into the weeds. And at the end of it she finds a gap in the perimeter wall where the bricks have fallen in.

Through the gap is a cottage nobody has mentioned to her in eleven years of living three streets away.

She goes in, obviously. Two dark rooms, a staircase with half its steps missing, a smooth round pebble sitting on a windowsill as though somebody put it there. Then the floorboards creak above her head.

Then, on her way out, she looks up and sees words scratched into the wood over the door.

Old Nina down the road knows what the place is. It was a plague house, where people who were infected were shut away, and the wall went up later so the churchgoers would not have to look at it.

Melody is a lovely narrator because she notices absolutely everything, and Thompson gives her plenty to notice. Her mum has started decluttering, which mainly means the family photographs are now in a box under the sideboard. Envelopes marked URGENT keep arriving and going straight to one side unopened. Her best friend Matthew answers the door holding a pool cue, and Jake Bishop, who used to be horrible to him, is standing behind him holding the other one.

None of that is stated as a problem. It just sits at the edge of the page, waiting for your reader to spot it.

A note on the sad bits, which are handled carefully but not hidden. Melody's dad has moved out, and the reason she started going to the graveyard in the first place was to get away from the rows. That is all in the past by the time the book starts. The plague house history, and what it was for, is discussed plainly.

What to read next

If your reader wants more of that street, The Goldfish Boy is Matthew's own book. He tells it from an upstairs window because he cannot make himself go outside, there is a missing toddler on the close, and there is a sadness in his family that the story does not tiptoe around.