Six plucky youngsters go to school and solve mysteries and generally get into trouble. Plans to build a local football stadium are threatened by a curse! Jack, Sonny and Linton investigate! An old woman is being driven out of her home by a Russian oligarch who wants to build a football stadium! Charlotte, Shauna and Mildred are on the job! Are the cases connected? Will more satellites fall out of the sky and put half the football team in hospital? What was the weird one-eyed thing seen floating around at the oligarch's party? What is the question to which the answer is throwing an old lady off the roof? Find out in The Case Of The Team Spirit!

One of the drawbacks of growing up feeling ambivalent about the whole educational process is a tendency to develop certain prejudices against the materials used to educate you. The books recommended to you in school or taught in class tend to become associated negatively with the idea of 'worthiness.' Which is to say, like medicine, these books are good for you. Which is daft. I genuinely loved a lot of the books I was taught in school - Huckleberry Finn and Wuthering Heights and Persuasion. That didn't stop me from regarding other books, not taught to me but on the curriculum, as 'worthy.' This included, but was not limited to, To Kill A Mockingbird, Roll Of Thunder Hear My Cry, and Under Goliath. Peter Carter's novel was doubly handicapped because it was set in Belfast and was about the Troubles. Nothing could be worthier than a children's book about the Troubles, especially to an Irish child living in the South, for whom the North was a troubled id, sending nightmares and other disturbances to bother the consciousness via the six o'clock news and newspaper headlines.

But here I am. Alan is a Protestant, but a bit of an outsider for all that, his father being British. With no interest in hardline Protestantism, he nonetheless develops a desire to play the lambegh, the huge drum used by Orange marching bands. In the event, he joins a band, but ends up playing the fife. A chance, and chancy, encounter, brings him into contact with Fergus, a Catholic piper, and a hidden gun. They meet each week, their relationship uneasily distorted by the gun, and by the growing unease throughout the city and province, to the point where it seems impossible for them to be friends.

This is brilliantly, beautifully written, psychologically astute, vivid with the sights and sounds of seventies Belfast, awash with the social and religious pressures dividing the inhabitants. The final chapters brilliantly describe a terrifying riot in all its confusion and violence. The framing device has a shockingly brutal bitterness to it. The boys might survive their childhood experiences but the cumulative effect destroys their innocence and warps their lives.

The lesson here is, I suppose, that sometimes worthy books really are truly and genuinely worthy books.

Having survived the perilous journey from Norway to Miklagard, Solveig is reunited with her father, a member of the Varangian Guard under Harald Hadragar. Her very presence is a difficulty, however, and comes to the attention of the Empress Zoe, who is planning on sending the Varangians to Sicily to wipe out the Saracens there. Though forbidden from going, she is taken along, and discovers that though her innocence survived the travails of the first journey amongst strangers, it might not survive the second, amongst family and friends. The Varangians are brutal and violent, and Harald himself is a devious and ruthless trickster. Solveig's heart is badly battered by the cruelty of her countrymen, and she struggles to resolve her affection for them with her horror at their actions, including her beloved father.

A tougher, more bruising read than Bracelet Of Bones. Though strong-willed and tough-minded, Solveig's spirit is threatened by her experiences, all the more so since the source of her distress are her own people. A brilliant look at love beset by casual violence, and a terrific medieval adventure. It feels like an ending, but another volume of Solveig's story would be more than welcome.

First Class Murder: first class book. Adorable homage to Christie, with a few nods to the spies of pre-war Europe, this takes the redoubtable and dauntless Detective Club on the Orient Express. A cast of shifty and distinctive characters climb aboard the carriage with our heroes, providing a juicy set of suspects and motives and mysteries for Wells and Wong to sort through when one of them gets gruesomely murdered. One problem is that they aren't the only amateur detectives who think they can sort things out on board.

I think more advanced readers will spot the solution to the fiendish puzzle, but the fun lies in watching Daisy and Hazel investigate despite irritating and intractable opposition by grown-ups. When the journey is over, villains unmasked, red-herrings set free and justice is done, one is left eagerly anticipating whatever is next in store for the Detective Society.

Poor Ebony. After an idyllic life on a farm near a village by the sea with her grandfather and her pet rat, life is thrown upside down by the sudden mysterious death of her grandfather. She is whisked off to Dublin by a Judge and sent to live with an aunt she never heard of. Not only that, she is part of a society of people who reincarnate through different lives. and her previous lives have not been terribly long-lived affairs. This one seems set to be cut short too. Can she solve the riddles and uncovers the secrets of the Nine Lives? Will she find out who murdered her granddad before it's too late? Who can she trust?

Packed with brilliantly barking ideas, mad settings, wild characters and strange inventions, this is a rip-roaring, action packed, twisty and turny read from the opening page to the final paragraph. Ebony's adventures are fast and furious and she and the reader are kept guessing right up to the end. Completely mad and lots of fun.

A children's mystery set in acnient Rome, as Flavia investigates the killing of her neighbour's dog, involving her slave, Nubia, her neighbour, Jonathan and a beggar-boy called Lupus. Written in a crisp, clear style that makes the period live in a solid, matter-of-fact way, and the characters of the four friends and their parents and servants and others are all well-drawn and the plot has twists and turns and enough to keep the pages turning fast.

Though Thieves Of Ostia was an assured and confident debut, this, the second in the PK Pinkerton series of western mysteries, is the delightful, well-crafted work of an experienced author. After all, I guessed the culprit early on in Thieves, but The Petrified Man kept me guessing till the final showdown.

Hired by by a terrified serving girl to find the man who murdered her mistress, a Soiled Dove ifyouknowwhatImeanandIthinkyoudo, the redoubtable, indefatigable but far from invulnerable PK cuts a swathe of chaos through Virginia City, 1862, with bullets and brawls and general upset following the investigation through saloons and cribs and newspaper offices and theaters and auctions houses. PK has a list of suspects and nothing, not desperadoes with guns or burning stables or lynch mobs or even jail is going to get in the way.

Funny, sharp, poignant, devilshly clever but also a wonderful and lively evocation of the Gold Rush town in all its glory, with an endearing and pragmatic protagonist whose oddly heartbreaking aim is to solve the enduring mystery of why people do the things they do.

This is a conventional ghost story because it is about a boy being haunted by a ghost. It is an unconventional ghost story because it is not scary, nor is it trying to be. The boy is never scared, just irritated and put out. He only really starts to get scared when something terrible nearly happens to someone else.

James Harrison is being haunted by the ghost of Thomas Kempe, a sorcerer who lived in his house hundreds of years before. Now as a ghost he wishes to reestablish himself as a sorcerer, with James as his apprentice. Leaving messages for James, committing odd acts of vandalism in the town and making a poltergeisty nuisance of himself around the house, he gets James in worse and worse trouble. James needs to get rid of Thomas Kempe, and soon.

This is a very funny book, and most of the humour comes from James: imaginative, self-centred but utterly prosaic and completely sure of himself. James is difficult in terms of creating messes and trouble and getting into scrapes, but he isn't mean, except perhaps a little to his sister. He's a sort of slightly less Williamy Just William, but Williamy enough to cause headaches. What happens over the course of the book, particularly after James discovers the journal of a woman and her nephew similarly haunted, is an odd, subtle growth. James' prodigious but self-absorbed imagination begins the process of transformation into empathy and awareness. It's sweet and touching as James forms a curious bond with two people long dead and begins to see the people around him as more than they appear.

A subtle, witty book, sharply written, and the combination of sharp subtle wit is irresistible. Its exploration of a young boy awakening to the world around him, the world of other people who are at first almost like supernatural things from another time, is warm and wonderful and wise.

Someone's lighting fires in old barns round Tackleford and an odd troll has been spotted living under the bridge. New chap Colm is convinced one is responsible for the other and wants Sonny and Linton to help apprehend the villain! But Lottie and Mildred have made friends with the troll and want to help find him a lady friend! A first date goes disastrously wrong and Tackleford erupts into riots and the fire brigade go mad altogether! YES BAD MACHINERY IS THE BEST OF THAT THERE IS NO DOUBT! Great story, great art, great characters, a laugh from start to finish.

Behind the gentle, pastel children's cover and between the slim pages of this little book lies a story that is at once small and personal and yet enormous in impact - but enormous is the wrong word, completely the wrong sort of language, there is nothing crude or outsize in this. It is written with elegance and feeling, delicate yet exact, from the opening walk through a garden that mingles childhood memories with adult distance and unspoken experience lost in the mysteries and difficulties of memory.

Edward and Jane grow up in the idyllic house and gardens of Medleycott at the outbreak of the Second World War. Their mother is dead, and their father is distant and difficult, and soon is mostly gone altogether, leaving them to run wild, playing together in their private world, cared for by the housekeeper, with the gardener, the farmer, the land girls and the Conscientious Objector billeted in the attic, their own perfect world. Every now and then their father intrudes, and it is his exasperation with Edward that will threaten their idyll.

Written with extraordinary beauty and intensity, evoking the Somerset countryside and the childish emotions and the adult regrets. It is warm, funny, fierce and ultimately heartbreaking. A brilliant, beautiful book, gorgeous to read, rich in feeling and vivid in setting and time.