The Secret of the Treasure Keepers

A. M. Howell's The Secret of the Treasure Keepers is a wintry mystery for 10 year olds about a telephone message that was never meant for a twelve-year-old girl.

What happens

It's February 1948 and London is grey, cold and still on rations. Ruth is waiting outside an office at the British Museum while her mum is interviewed for a proper paid job. The telephone on the desk won't stop ringing. So Ruth answers it.

The woman on the line is Mrs Sterne, calling from a farm in the Fens. She's found something in her field that might be treasure, and the ground is getting waterlogged. The museum's grumpy Mr Knight is off on a dig and doesn't want to hear from children. So Ruth and her mum pack a trowel and catch the train to Ely themselves.

Rook Farm isn't the cosy countryside Ruth pictured. There's a leaking ceiling, a growling old dog and rooks on the barn roof. Joe, whose mum runs the farm, glares at them like they've come to steal something. Audrey, the young woman who worked there as a Land Girl, is friendly but jumpy. Everyone seems to be keeping something back.

The 1948 details are brilliant. Powdered egg. Torches in the smog. A family walking home past bomb rubble being loaded on to a truck. Ruth even remembers an unexploded bomb being wheeled away from their front door in a wheelbarrow! It never feels like a history lesson, though. It's just the world Ruth lives in.

There's a lot going on inside Ruth too. Her parents have decided to divorce (kindly, as friends), and money is tight. She's scared they'll have to leave the little house with the mural her dad painted on her bedroom wall. Mr Knight has a way of making her feel very small. You really feel for her, and you really want her to be right about the treasure.

It's a mystery with real feelings in it, and a slow, atmospheric build rather than a race, which suits a reader who enjoys settling in. Who hasn't wanted to prove a grown-up wrong?

What to read next

For another A. M. Howell mystery with a girl on the outside looking in, try The Garden of Lost Secrets. Clara is sent to her stern aunt's cottage on a grand country estate with a secret folded in her apron pocket, and a long list of places she mustn't go.