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!
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A twenty-fourth case for Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw, and Bob Andrews, and the sixth time they’ve been directed by Mary Virginia Carey, The Mystery of Death Trap Mine (1976) marks very slight change of pace for the Three Investigators.
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Another Choose Your Own Adventure-style mystery, this one aimed at the younger market. So how does it stack up in comparison to the other two I’ve tried thus far, which were more clearly for grown-ups?
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Given that it revolves around loosely-codified magic, a world of ‘normal’ folk living below a world of ‘giants’ in the sky, and a pigeon who is an art critic, The Beanstalk Murder (2025) by P.G. Bell is a far better book than it has any right to be.
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Following the conclusion of the excellent Adventures on Trains series by M.G. Leonard and Sam Sedgman, I — no doubt along, one suspects, with children’s publishers — was keen for another dose of transport-based juvenile mystery-making. And so at the start of the Mysteries at Sea series by A.M. Howell do we find ourselves.
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While I would have liked Sam Sedgman’s debut novel The Clockwork Conspiracy (2024) to be rather more clue-based, given his history in the juvenile mystery field, I nevertheless enjoyed its fast pace, high energy, interesting premise, and unusual settings, and so am back for its sequel, The Forbidden Atlas (2025).
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A final non-canonical Sherlock Holmes story this month, with Death Cloud (2010) by Andrew Lane being aimed at the 8 to 12 year-old market and setting up some Minor Felonies posts for Tuesdays in January.
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A nice bit of crossover here, with a juvenile mystery that’s also a self-published impossible crime novel easing the transition from Minor Felonies this month to another batch of Adventures in Self-Publishing in November.
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While it’s only the second book I’ve read in the Screech Owl series, Death Down Under (2001) by Roy MacGregor is in fact the fifteenth entry, and continues the tonal dissonance from my first encounter.
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For the restraint alone in not calling this dog-as-detective story an ‘im-paw-sible crime’, this 14th entry in the Sebastian (Super Sleuth) series by Mary Blount Christian deserves checking out.
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