Read The Twitchers 4 – Feather free for 7 days. £7.99/month after - less than a paperback.
M. G. Leonard's The Twitchers 4 - Feather is a clever birdwatching mystery for 9 year olds that starts with a museum heist one girl walks straight into.
This is the fourth and last Twitchers book. Ava Kingfisher's class is visiting a natural history museum when an alarm goes off. Everyone assumes it's a fire. Ava, being Ava, goes looking for the thief instead.
What she finds is a room full of empty drawers. Someone has taken the museum's birds of paradise, collected long ago by the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace. The alarm on the famous Darwin's finches was only a decoy. And on the floor lies a big black feather that shouldn't be there at all.
The police don't take her seriously (the Chief Superintendent tells her to keep the feather as a souvenir). So Ava slips away from her school coach and catches a train to Briddvale, to hand the case to her friends. Her mum is NOT impressed.
Why would anyone steal a dead bird? That's the first thing the gang have to work out, and the answer is fascinating. It turns out old feathers can be worth a small fortune to the wrong kind of collector.
It's a proper whodunnit, with casebooks, timings and theories scribbled down on Tara's bedroom floor. There's plenty of real bird knowledge from Twitch, and it never feels like a lesson because it all matters to the case.
There are lots of laughs as well. Jack can't bear to wait five minutes to hear the details. Terry has been "helping" Pam with her computer, which the others are convinced means romance (it very much doesn't). And a raven watches Ava from the trees with eyes "wicked and wise".
If your reader hasn't met the Twitchers yet, Ava introduces everyone in the opening pages. They'll get more out of it if they've been with the gang from the start, though.
It's a great pick for your reader if they love a mystery that feels like it could happen in their own town, with real science behind every clue.
If the museum is what grabs them, Beetle Boy is another M. G. Leonard to try. It opens with a scientist vanishing from a room at the Natural History Museum that was locked from the inside, and his son determined to find out how.
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