P.G. Bell’s first Fairy Tale Murder Mystery, The Beanstalk Murder (2024), was so damn entertaining and so well-plotted that you bet I was going to jump on the follow-up, The Big Bad Wolf Murder (2025), as soon as I could. Indeed, as a glimpse behind the blogging curtain: I read this second book before the review of that first one had even appeared on the blog. Hairy Aaron!

This second book stands alone from The Beanstalk Murder both in terms of its contents — new setting, new characters — and its tone. Where Bell’s first foray into this sort of crossover mystery had the trappings of a Golden Age detective novel, The Big Bad Wolf Murder is a fast and tense chase thriller, a sort of race-against-time setup that relies on different ideas and structure, and shows Bell as a consummate professional who is able to turn his talents very well to these contrasting setups.

We open in the grand final of the Tooth & Claw tournament, a pursuit game where one of the humanoid wolves who live alongside humans in the city of Netherburg must catch a team of humans in an artificial forest-cum-assault course. This year, the human team the Netherburg Reds — composed of the teenage girls Roselyn, Voss, Akako, and 12 year-old Ruby — are the ones who are going for glory, against the famous and fearsome wolf player Alarick, on a 10-year winning streak at the tournament. When Alarick drops dead just as he is about to prevent Ruby from scoring the winning points, and when the means of his death are discovered in Ruby’s possession, it seems that she has little choice but to go on the run in order to clear her name.

Once again, Bell is to be highly commended for how quickly and cleanly he drops you into this world, with its complexities and prejudices worn lightly but unmistakably so as to ground you all the more quickly:

“You’ve seen what [Alarick’s] capable of,” said her mother, shooting a meaningful look at Marecline’s [injured] leg. “There’s something of the wild about him.”

Ruby gasped. “Mum, you can’t say that about wolves any more!”

“And it’s not true for most of them,” her mother replied. “Goodness knows your father and I were delighted to help the Volkov’s at number seventeen when they had their second litter of the year.”

“Decent sorts,” said Ruby’s father. “Hard workers.”

When Ruby ends up on the run with a young wolf called Fillan, we get a lightning-fast tour of Netherburg taking in its criminal quarter, the plush end of town (“The really posh neighbourhoods still don’t let wolves move in.”), the mysterious woods and their rumours of magic…the whole world really breathing as we race from set piece to set piece, hurried along by the pursuit of our central pair by the terrifying wolf bounty hunter Hardulph, who is as superb an antagonist as I’ve yet encountered in these books for younger readers: a seemingly-unstoppable and physically terrifying thing of the woods who has one aim and a single-minded devotion when it comes to achieving it.

Along the way, Bell also somehow works in time for a few reflections on stereotypes, the nature of friendship, and the need to be patient and considerate of others we know less well than we think. It’s nothing new of kid’s literature, of course, but when Bell ties it so neatly into the action, or into the emerging characters of Ruby and Fillan — we meet them, they run, we learn about them on the way — it doesn’t feel heavy-handed at all. Hell, there’s even a superb thread on the nature of celebrity, and how someone’s public persona may not reflect who they are in private and how that persona, while it might make them famous and successful, actually ends up being more damaging in the community they’re seen to represent. And there’s a really heartbreaking skein of how something that means a great deal to you can be rendered almost valueless because of the power other people have to take your successes away from you.

Yes, the world-building and wider considerations here really are exceptional.

Amidst the subtle view of this semi-steampunk setup — the police have gas-powered crossbows, and patrol the city in Zeppelin-like airships — there’s slightly less of the detection which made The Beanstalk Murder such a delightful surprise, but equally a few clever moments (“Do any of these smell like menthol to you?”) move things along intelligently, and the finale is a lot of fun in how it twists the various threads together. A few reversals in the plot really did leave me genuinely unsure what to expect from the eventual guilty party of this, and add into the text a few moments that honestly reminded me of Terry Pratchett…

As his old man used to say, if it ain’t greasy, it ain’t food. That was the philosophy his father had lived by — although, admittedly, he hadn’t lived very long…

…and you have another triumph on your hands.

I read this so quickly, and was having such a fun time, that you’d be distressed to learn exactly how far through I was until it occurred to me that Ruby in her red-hooded top, was a stand-in for one of the most famous characters in folk-story tradition. What can I say? P.G. Bell has done something really quite excellent here, injecting a superbly-structured world with heart, a gripping story, excellent characters, and some crowd-pleasing moments that allow our heroes to triumph with their brains as much as their physical prowess. I have no idea if more of these are planned, but the first two entries in this endeavour show how superbly these principles can be turned into intelligent and gripping fiction, and so I sincerely hope that P.G. Bell is not done with fairy tales yet.

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Fairy Tale Murder Mysteries by P.G. Bell

1. The Beanstalk Murder (2024)
2. The Big Bad Wolf Murder (2025)