The Seaside Corpse (2022), Martha Jocelyn’s fourth novel to feature the Agatha Christie-inspired 13 year-old sleuth Aggie Morton, recently won the Edgar for Best Juvenile Mystery, so let’s jump back into the series where I’ve reached to date: book 3, The Dead Man in the Garden (2021).
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Mary Virginia Carey would, in time, write more books in the Three Investigators series than any of the four other writers so employed, but got off to a slightly wobbly start with The Mystery of the Flaming Footprints (1971). So will her second title, The Mystery of the Singing Serpent (1972), find her on better form?
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Well, it took seven-and-a-half years and over one thousand posts, but it’s finally happened: I have read a book about which I can find nothing to say.
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I think I’ve been dimly aware of Nancy Springer’s series centred on Enola Holmes, much younger sister of the more famous Sherlock and Mycroft, for a number of years, but it was only the recent(ish) filming of the first book which brought the series more firmly into my orbit.
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Another exclusive boarding school, another murderer on the loose — if mysteries for younger readers are anything to go by, put your kids in the local comp to keep them safe.
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If the genre’s Golden Age had one commendable attribute, it’s that there was no pressure to outdo previous entries in a series by going bigger, louder, or more preposterous with each successive entry.
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This second entry in Marthe Jocelyn’s Aggie Morton series — featuring juvenile sleuths inspired by both Agatha Christie and her arguably most famous creation Hercule Poirot — contains much of the charm that made the series opener stand out, but also falls down in ways that leave me a little underwhelmed.
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