Read The Secret Detectives free in the Little Reads app.
The Secret Detectives by Ella Risbridger is a murder mystery for 11 year olds, set on a three-week voyage from India to England with nowhere for anybody to get off.
Isobel Petty is eleven and nobody's favourite child. She dislikes nearly everyone she meets, and it is thoroughly mutual.
She knows precisely why. Her black dress has faded brown in patches. Her eyes are too big and her chin is too sharp. She thinks she looks like a house crow, and she isn't wrong.
Her mother once called her a funny little thing to a guest at dinner. They both laughed. Isobel was under the table and heard every word, and she has kept it ever since.
Now her parents are dead and she's being shipped to an uncle in England she has never met. The lawyer explained it to her in neat, obvious sentences, like a parcel with an address on the front.
Sharing her cabin is Letitia, who is ten and tall and extremely capable, with blue bows on her hat and her shoes and the end of her plait. Grown-ups adore Letitia. Isobel disliked her within roughly four seconds.
What makes this so good to read is that Isobel notices everything. She carries a notebook and writes down exactly what people do, because matching the thing to the right word makes the world make sense to her.
She keeps it tucked into the top of her knickers, which tells you how much she trusts the people on this ship.
She isn't a warm narrator. She's precise, a bit cross, and funny in a way she doesn't intend. Your reader will either recognise her instantly or be quietly appalled by her, and both are good fun.
Then one night she sees somebody go over the side. There's no splash that she can hear. In the morning the captain says nobody is missing at all.
So Isobel has three weeks to work out who was killed and who did it, and she'll have to do it with Letitia and her little brother Horace, which is not remotely what she wanted.
A couple of things to know about. Isobel's parents die before the book starts and she was left alone in the house for a while afterwards, which she avoids thinking about. She then witnesses a murder in the first chapters.
The story is also set in the last days of British India, and the grown-ups say cold things about Isobel in front of her, including about her being darker-skinned than her mother.
None of it is gratuitous and Isobel is never pitied. But a child who has lost someone, or who is sensitive to a lonely narrator, may need you nearby. A reader who enjoys a prickly, watchful heroine will love her.
Hand them Murder Most Unladylike afterwards. Hazel Wong keeps the casebook for a detective society at her boarding school, then finds a mistress dead in the gym, and five minutes later the body has gone.
A library hand-picked by an English teacher, delivered through a calm, ad-free app. If your child already loves reading, we keep up.
No trial. No payment. Just download.
