Timmi Tobbson – Legend of the Star Runner

J. I. Wagner's Legend of the Star Runner is a solve it yourself mystery for 8 year olds where your reader has to find the answer in a picture before the story will move on.

What happens

Timmi, Lilli and Marvin are three friends on the first morning of the summer holidays. Lilli's grandpa has told her to be at his house at ten o'clock sharp because there is a treasure involved. When they get there he will not answer the door.

So the first puzzle is how to get in. The cat managed it somehow, and the answer is in the drawing on the next page.

That is the shape of the whole book. A chapter stops on a question, you turn to a picture, and the next chapter opens with the children explaining what they spotted.

Some of them are proper little logic problems. Which road on an old map actually reaches the lake. Why a woman is about to leave her desk. What is sitting in a kitchen that proves somebody was in there twenty minutes ago.

The treasure belongs to a pirate called Lotterlulu, whose ship the Star Runner anchored in the town river in 1755 and vanished three nights later without breaking the blockade and without sinking.

And there is a reason to hurry. Lilli listens at a door with a wine glass and finds out that her grandpa is in debt and about to lose the house.

The three of them make a good team. Timmi narrates and carries an asthma inhaler, which comes out whenever things get tense. Lilli charges at everything and is quite sharp with the other two. Marvin loves every animal he meets, bobs up and down when he is excited, and is usually the one who notices.

Fair warning that they do misbehave. They tell a librarian a lie to get past her, wait for her to walk her dog, and go hunting for a key that is not theirs to take. Nobody ever tells them off for it.

The pictures do real work here, so it is worth reading somewhere the drawings come up big. Your reader will also enjoy it far more if nobody hurries them along.

It is not a book to race through, in other words. It is a book to argue about.

What to read next

If they like being handed the clues, The Highland Falcon Thief works the same way. Harrison is stuck on a steam train with an uncle he hardly knows when a jewel goes missing, and the whispers and the notes are all there for the reader to catch.