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Harriet Whitehorn's Violet and the Smugglers is a sunny detective story for 7 year olds, set on a little wooden sailing boat heading up the coast to Venice.
Violet's godfather Johnny has inherited a boat. It's old and small and has no running water, so her mum politely says no thank you. But Violet, her dad and her friend Art get to sail it from Corfu to meet everyone in Venice.
It's all very exciting. Then Violet wakes up in the middle of the night and sees something odd on the boat next door.
That boat belongs to a gloomy Italian captain who eats his spaghetti on deck to LOUD opera every evening. Johnny calls him Mr Jolly (partly because that's his boat's name in Italian, and partly... well, you can guess). At midnight a boy on a bike with no lights hands him a flat box. Mr Jolly hands over a pile of banknotes.
What's in the box? Art decides straight away that he must be a smuggler. And Violet has heard about people smuggling tortoises, because a famous opera singer made it fashionable to stick diamonds on their shells (Violet loves tortoises, so she's horrified).
Reading this is like being on holiday with a friend who notices everything. The storyteller chats to you as it goes along. At one point she skips a whole week of sailing with a countdown, from Art falling overboard ten times all the way down to doing French and maths just once. It's very funny.
Violet isn't perfect, which helps. She tells her dad a whopping fib so she can tail Mr Jolly through Dubrovnik (and the book tells you very firmly that you must never do that!). She's brave and nosy and has quick ideas, and Art is a cheerful sidekick who'll try anything.
There's lots to enjoy beyond the mystery too. Swimming with dolphins, cooking on a deserted island, beating the grown-ups at poker. It's a proper summer holiday on the page.
If this one goes down well, there's another Violet case in Violet and the Mummy Mystery, where her cousin Agnes comes to stay from Cairo with a pet rat who lives in a bag.
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