Kate Messner’s Capture the Flag is a snowed-in mystery for 9 year olds, and it opens with a robbery you get to watch happen.<\/p>\n
A man hides behind a table in a sealed room at the Smithsonian. He waits. He counts to one thousand shallow breaths. Then he unscrews the clamps one by one and folds up the flag that Francis Scott Key wrote his song about, as calmly as if he were folding a beach blanket.<\/p>\n
So you know exactly who took it. Nobody else does. That is the fun of it.<\/p>\n
Three children were at the museum gala that night, sitting on the same bench, not speaking to each other. Anna was scribbling notes for her school paper. Jos\u00e9 was reading Harry Potter with a napkin of cookies in his lap. Henry was trying to reach Level 9 on his game.<\/p>\n
The next morning a freak snowstorm grounds half the flights out of Washington. There are not enough plug sockets at Gate B-16. Anna unplugs Henry’s game to charge her laptop, and that is how they meet (it goes about as well as you would expect).<\/p>\n
Then the theft hits the news, and Anna works out that if the men who did it are anywhere, they are probably snowed in at this airport too.<\/p>\n
Something bigger is going on underneath. All three children have a relative who wears silver jewellery shaped like a jaguar. All three have parents who take urgent, whispered phone calls in the night. The kids have no idea yet. You get told before they do, which is a very nice place to be sitting.<\/p>\n
One thing to know before you hand it over. Henry’s mum died of cancer three years ago, and he is still angry about it. This is in his first few pages, so it is background rather than something waiting to happen, and it mostly shows up as him being fed up about his dad’s new wife and a move he does not want. For a child who has lost someone, that is worth a quiet word first. For everyone else it just explains why Henry is so cross with the world.<\/p>\n
The chapters are short and it keeps cutting between the children and the thieves. If you have got a reader who loves knowing more than the characters do and silently telling them to HURRY UP, this is built for them.<\/p>\n
If a team of kids running rings around the grown-ups goes down well, try The Great Greene Heist. Jackson Greene has given up scheming, more or less, until a school election gets fixed and he starts quietly putting a crew back together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Kate Messner’s Capture the Flag is a snowed-in mystery for 9 year olds, and it opens with a robbery you get to watch happen. A man hides behind a table in a sealed room at the Smithsonian. He waits. He counts to one thousand shallow breaths. Then he unscrews the clamps one by one and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":11107,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"lr_next_read_post_id":9100,"lr_next_read_anchor":"The Great Greene Heist","lr_seo_hook":"A museum heist you watch happen, then three strangers stuck in an airport."},"book_tag":[22],"age_group":[24],"book_type":[1044],"book_author":[542],"class_list":["post-7047","our-books","type-our-books","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","book_tag-mystery-books","age_group-books-for-9-year-olds","book_type-paid","book_author-kate-messner"],"yoast_title":"Capture the Flag by Kate Messner | Little Reads","yoast_metadesc":"A museum heist you watch happen, then three strangers stuck in an airport. For ages 9+. 3,000+ books in the Little Reads app. 7-day free trial.","acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n