The London Eye Mystery

Siobhan Dowd's The London Eye Mystery is a clever puzzle of a book for 11 year olds about a boy who goes up on a giant wheel and never comes down.

What happens

Ted's cousin Salim is staying for a night or two with his mum, Aunt Gloria, on their way from Manchester to a new life in New York. Salim wants to ride the Eye. In the long ticket queue a stranger offers them a single free ticket, and Ted and his big sister Kat let Salim take it.

They track his pod the whole way round. At the very top they both shout "NOW!" at the same moment, so they know it's the right one. Thirty minutes later the doors open and everyone gets off. Everyone except Salim.

Ted tells the story himself, and he's the reason to read it. His brain, he says, runs on a different operating system from other people's. He counts his Shreddies, knows everything about the weather and takes sayings literally (hearing that Aunt Gloria drives Dad bananas leaves him picturing a car full of fruit). Jokes and white lies are hard for him. But he notices what everybody else misses.

It's funny and quite moving at the same time. There's a lovely night-time chat where Salim asks Ted what his syndrome is actually like, and Ted tells him things he's never told anyone before.

Kat is great too. She's rude to Ted most of the time, then grabs his hand in the crowd when everything goes wrong. There's a family row brewing between two sisters as well, so the grown-ups have plenty going on.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The family talk like real people, so there's some mild swearing and a fair bit of smoking. Salim also mentions the racist name a school friend was bullied with. It's all in passing and never nasty in tone. For a reader at the top of this shelf it'll most likely just feel real.

What to read next

Another case written up by a young detective is Murder Most Unladylike. Hazel and Daisy run a secret detective society at their boarding school, until Hazel stumbles on a real body.