Who in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?

Rebecca Tinker's Who in the World Is Carmen Sandiego is a fast, glossy caper for 10 year olds in which the world's most wanted thief finally explains herself.

What happens

It opens in Poitiers at dusk, with an Interpol inspector sitting in a parked car who has not slept in two days. Chase Devineaux is certain this is his moment. Beside him, a new recruit called Julia Argent is scrolling through blurred photographs of a woman in a red coat leaving a bank in Hong Kong, boarding a train in Norway, never once showing her face.

Then the woman in red goes straight past the windscreen.

What follows is a proper chase. Rooftops, a grappling hook, a lipstick that turns out to be a lock-picking device, a vault behind a bookcase and a blue gemstone the size of a football. Carmen does stop, mid-job, to admire the view, because she can.

But inside the vault there's something she wasn't expecting, and her voice goes strange when she sees it.

That's the real story. On the train afterwards a young man called Gray gets into her compartment, fries her earpiece with a pulse device and calls her by a name she hasn't heard in years. Black Sheep. They were at school together. At a school for thieves.

So Carmen starts talking, and the book switches to her telling it in her own voice.

She was left as a baby outside Buenos Aires with nothing but a set of Russian nesting dolls. Whoever found her worked for a criminal organisation, so instead of an orphanage she was brought up on their private island, by the five teachers of their academy, with a revolving door of nannies from everywhere in the world who each taught her their own country.

It is, she says, a lovely place to grow up, and the reader can see what she can't yet.

Your reader should know the heroine is a thief and the school is a school for stealing, which the book treats as ordinary. The action is comic-book rather than nasty. Crossbow bolts get fired, she blocks them with a shield, and she feels worse about the antique than about herself.

What to read next

For another girl who watches everybody and writes it all down, try Ruby Redfort: Look Into My Eyes. Ruby keeps six hundred notebooks of other people's business under her floorboards, and somebody is about to notice.