Read The Mystery of the Painted Dragon free for 7 days. £7.99/month after - less than a paperback.
Katherine Woodfine's The Mystery of the Painted Dragon is a mystery for 9 year olds set among the art schools, galleries and tea shops of London in 1909.
It opens with a real jolt. A young artist walking home in the rain realises a man in a bowler hat is following her. She makes it down to the Underground. Then footsteps come along the empty platform behind her...
After that, the story jumps back three months, to Leo.
Leo lives in a huge old house full of secret passages, with parents who barely notice her and a big brother who twists her wrist for fun. She walks with a crutch after a long illness when she was little. What she wants more than anything is to paint. And she's just won a place at the best art school in London!
Meanwhile Sophie and Lil have become rather well-known detectives. Not that every case is exciting. Sophie has just rescued a cat from a tree and been paid sixpence for it (Lil promptly names them the Sixpenny Detectives). Lil is now acting in a West End play, and her charming brother Jack has secretly quit Oxford to go to art school too.
Then a famous art collector announces a grand exhibition of precious old paintings. Where? At Sinclair's.
It's a lovely, rich read. The art school is full of students in mismatched shoes, a fearsome drawing professor and talk of the café where all the artists go. Leo is a brilliant new character. She's prickly and awkward and says the wrong thing, then wishes she hadn't. Who hasn't done that?
It's worth knowing that the opening chapter is genuinely frightening. The young woman is pushed onto the railway tracks with a train coming out of the tunnel, and the chapter stops right there. If your reader is anxious about that sort of thing, it might be one to read together. Leo's family are pretty unkind about her disability too, though Leo herself is having none of it.
For anyone who loves friendship, clues and a bit of Edwardian sparkle, it's a treat.
It's the third Sinclair's Mystery and it's full of what happened in the first two, so do go back to The Mystery of the Clockwork Sparrow if you can.
If they'd like another clever girl who spots what the grown-ups miss, A Girl Called Justice is in the library too. Justice is twelve, newly sent to a gloomy boarding school on the marshes, and quite sure the place has potential for murder.
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.
