Current crime and detective fiction fans needn’t look too hard to find a successful children’s author who transitioned well into writing books for grown-ups, and now Janice Hallett, author of The Appeal (2021) and four subsequent books, is heading in the other direction, with A Box Full of Murders (2025) being her debut for the 9-to-12 year-old market.

Following a setup that will be familiar to anyone who had read Hallett’s previous books, the story here — of a Scout and Guide camp in 1983 — is told via discovered documents found in the eponymous box, which itself has been found in the attic of siblings Ava and Luke Hunter. The siblings, each living with one of their parents who are going through a trial separation, share the contents of the documents within via a non-specified mobile phone communication app that enables Luke, who actually has the box, to photograph the documents and send them to Ava, the two of them then discussing, every few pages, what they’ve just read, often trying to make sense of the anachronisms…some of which, as a child of the 1980s, really did have me laughing (“Phone box — a public phone in the old days.”).

The origins of the box, and the mysterious note at the top daring whoever finds it to read the contents, remain uncertain, but what is clear is that something unusual happened on that camp: people keep telling stories of a ghost on the land, and more than a few people are terrified by staring eyes and a hideous, jibbering howl while alone amongst the trees. And, given the title of the novel containing all this, how long before a body turns up? And whose will it be?

The creativity with which Hallett approaches the telling of this tale is to be applauded: we get diaries, incident forms, police reports, emails, newspaper clippings, various diagrams (from the very talented Marta Kissi), activity sheet telling the camp attendees how to acquire badges…and the text exchanges of Ava and Luke. Putting it together must have taken aaaaages, but, equally, Hallett has so completely made this style of storytelling her own that I wonder if she’s able to even plan things out in straight prose any more. Her most experimental work these days would probably be just a standard, third-person-narrator book the likes of which we take completely for granted.

Anyway. This approach also has its drawbacks.

Firstly, there are waaaaay too many people in this. The camp consists of five tents, each containing four young people and — er, spoilers? — since none of them die, they’re referred to throughout the whole case and it becomes impossible to keep them all straight. Even worse, different diary entries for each tent are written by multiple members of each tent, so the book has something like 12 different narrators and that’s simply too many, especially when you get forms filled out by Brown Owl or whoever in a way that’s supposed to really bring her character to the fore. How many young kids — hell, how many adult readers — are really keeping track of all this?

Additionally, since the multiple narrators all need to be introduced and play their part in the story before things get too intriguing, it takes an age for the book to get going, and once it gets going it can often feel a real trudge between notable events, juggled as they are through six different types of media. Honestly, this needed one person telling it in the diary entries, some focussed personality from the past for us to be able to latch onto, because it’s too confusing and torpid as is. You could cut 150 pages from this 455-page book very easily. It is far, far too long — one diary entry describes a fishing sojourn by saying that “it felt as if we were standing there for a century, with nothing happening” and, ouch, the meta, it burns. I mean, I can see broadsheet newspapers falling over themselves to praise this, but I don’t imagine many 10 year-olds are going to finish it and be too excited for the foreshadowed sequel.

I won’t deny, however, that some of the ideas, and especially the core message at the centre of the book, are very good, and apt for the age group this is aimed at. It’s a little on the nose, but then kids are a bit dense, aren’t they? Of course, Ava and Luke are able to get around the sorts of problems that would realistically halt their investigation in its tracks, but that could be said of so many of these Minor Felonies posts; the important thing is that they’re resourceful and intelligent company, brought to life easily through Hallett’s comfort with this style of letting so much about her characters bleed through their interactions, and its difficult not to root for them.

I wanted to love this, and am a little put out to find it merely…sorta fine. I love the invention that Hallett has brought to the crowded market she is entering here, but her increasingly verbose tendencies — her latest grown-up novel, The Examiner (2024), was also in serious need of a hefty trim — tell against her. Books for kids do seem to be getting longer, but when M.G, Leonard and Sam Sedgman, or Stuart Gibbs, can tell a far more compelling story in 60% of the space, I’ll maintain that good books are about skill over volume any day of the week. I’m unlikely to queue up for that sequel, but then I doubt Hallett is going to lose any sleep over that.

Also, why do Mr. Jolly’s trousers have one leg slightly shorter than the other? Was that ever addressed? And, if not, then what was that about?