Where Seagulls Dare

Where Seagulls Dare by Anthony Horowitz is a comic detective story for 9 year olds that Nick Diamond says still gives him nightmares.

What happens

This is the eighth Diamond Brothers book. Nick is fourteen and lives in Camden Town with his big brother Tim, the worst private detective in the world. It's the summer holidays and they're sharing out a tiny box of cornflakes one flake at a time (there's no milk).

Then a glamorous young woman called Jane Nightingale knocks on the door. Her father writes books about computers, and he's vanished from his house in Bath. She pays a week in advance and Tim falls in love on the spot.

Nick looks the missing man up online and spots a problem straight away. She can't spell her own dad's name.

Down in Bath the brothers get in by falling through a rotten roof. Inside is a filthy house crammed with brand new computers. Then two bikers with shaved heads let themselves in, hunting for something they call a rubber duck. And why would they phone the Archbishop of London's office afterwards?

It's all told by Nick and there's a joke in almost every line. Tim takes everything literally. Told the missing man lives in Bath, he decides he was last seen in the bath! He calls their client Miss Nightinjail and Miss Hikingtrail.

Your reader gets to notice the odd little details alongside Nick, like the earrings that don't match or the zebras that keep turning up around the house. Tim, of course, notices nothing at all.

Be ready for some proper danger, though. The bikers carry very big guns and happily plan to shoot whoever is behind a curtain (they nearly shoot the cat instead). A fortune cookie warns Tim he'll be violently murdered, and the next day a steel girder from a crane only just misses the pair of them.

Nick's first page also promises worse to come, from a dungeon to a fall without a parachute. There's a bit of mild swearing too. Nobody gets hurt in those early scenes and it's all played for laughs. A child who's anxious about guns might find it a lot. If your reader loves a caper where the crooks are almost as daft as the detective, they'll have a brilliant time.

What to read next

If they're joining the brothers here, try going back to The Falcon's Malteser. It's an earlier case, when Nick was thirteen and the two of them lived above a supermarket in Fulham. A client hands over a rattling brown envelope there and dives under the desk when a car backfires.