FernFolio » mystery

Haunted by Barbara Haworth-Attard

fernfolio — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:39:16 +0000

When the bones of a young girl are found on the mountain, buried under the tree where she used to play, and four years after many believed that she had run away with her lover, shock and grief soon turn to suspicion.
For fourteen-year Dee Vale, an illegitimate child living her with her stern and unemotional Gran, the body’s discovery begins a dark and difficult period. Her Gran, whose help during childbirth and whose teas and potions are asked for and consumed by neighbours too poor to call upon Dr. Hughes, the local physician, is called a witch by these same neighbours and, as the police investigation stalls, is accused of murder. Her long-time friend, Billy, suddenly announces he supposes he’ll marry her, before taking up with Vivien, a sly and unpredictable girl whose family has moved into the abandoned house next door. As she and her friend Clooey begin their final year at the school at Price’s Corners, Dee starts to dream of the two of them continuing onto the high school in the nearby town of Wallen, and of one day becoming a nurse, though she knows her Gran expects her to remain at home. She makes friends with Clarence, a young soldier who has returned from the trenches missing parts of his mind and memories.
Gifted, or cursed, with the Sight and able from her earliest childhood to see ghosts, Dee becomes aware of the presence of a dark shadow up on the mountain, a shadow that seems to creep ever closer to her home, one that starts to stalk her. Gradually, Dee becomes aware that a number of young girls have disappeared from the area around Price’s Corners and Wallen during recent years. Her Gift allows Dee to read the resting place of one girl, and to relive the death of one of another, and she begins to realise that she might be the only person able to uncover the identity of the monster killing these young girls. As the community’s mood turns ugly, and vigilantes threaten to take justice into their own hands, Dee must take a difficult stand against her Gran, her friends and neighbours, and risk her own safety, to find and stop a murderer before he can kill again.
Set in Ontario just after World War I, Haunted unfolds against the backdrop of small-town and small-minded fears and prejudice. Dee, whose give name is Defiance, is a strong and remarkable young girl whose steadfast belief in herself and her friends, in the face of ugly rumours and accusations, is a testament to friendship and courage. A tale that will haunt the reader…
FernFolio Editor

Not Suitable for Family Viewing by Vicki Grant

fernfolio — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 14:15:18 +0000

It’s hard to be the overweight and socially awkward daughter of a media superstar. Living in the shadow of her mother, Mimi, whose talk show, You, You and Mimi, is watched by hundreds of millions of people all over the world, seventeen-year old Robin Schwartz struggles with apathy and depression. Burned by classmates who became friendly with her only to meet Mimi and her celebrity friends, forgotten by her fun but irresponsible rock musician father, and ignored by her perpetually busy mother, Robin has everything that money can buy and nothing that she needs. She knows that the only person who loves her is Anita, her mother’s housekeeper, and the only person who listens to her is her senile grandfather. In recent years, the only contact Robin has had with her mother is by watching her on television.
When she finds a high school ring and photograph hidden inside a chair in her mother’s bedroom, Robin is perplexed. She recognises her mother’s face in the photograph, but cannot imagine when and why Mimi might have visited Port Minton, Nova Scotia, or why someone on their high school’s hockey team would have given Mimi his championship ring. Urged by Anita to get off the sofa and do something other than watch reruns of her mother’s show, and goaded by Selena, Anita’s teenaged daughter, Robin decides to go to Port Minton and find some answers.
When the bus driver drops her off at the side of the road in Port Minton, Robin discovers a fishing village that is largely abandoned, following the collapse of the fishery. A guy in a battered old van picks her up and offers to drive her to nearby Shelton, where there is a hostel, and Robin is strapped into her seat before she starts to question the wisdom of climbing into the vehicle of a tall, well-built stranger. She embarrasses herself by screaming and giving him a black eye, when he reaches across to let her out at the hostel, but Levi Nauss will help Robin by telling her about Port Minton, and introducing her to many of its former inhabitants. Too bad she can’t find the courage to tell him who she really is, or why she’s come to Nova Scotia with questions, especially when it becomes clear that someone is trying to kill her.
Written by Vicki Grant, author of Quid Pro Quo, The Puppet Wrangler, and Pigboy, Not Suitable for Family Viewing tells the story of one teenaged girl’s journey in search of some insight into her emotionally absent mother, and about the friends, the self-acceptance and the mother she finds along the way. A terrific book for readers from grade 7 up!
FernFolio Editor

The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart

fernfolio — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:00:41 +0000

ARE YOU A GIFTED CHILD LOOKING FOR SPECIAL OPPORTUNITIES? The ad, which appears in the local newspaper, catches Reynard Muldoon’s eye. The eleven-year old, who is constantly taunted and ridiculed by the other children because of his exceptional intelligence, has completed every class and read every book in the Stonetown Orphanage. Even his kind tutor, Miss Perumal, admits that there is nothing further she can teach him.
So with Miss Perumal’s encouragement, Reynie replies to the ad, and is directed to a downtown building to complete the first of three examinations that test both his intellectual skills, and his moral fibre. He meets the brilliant and timid George “Sticky” Washington, also eleven, Kate Wetherall, twelve, whose has spent years with the circus and can measure any distance with a look, and the small and belligerently obstinate Constance Contraire. Along with them, he is taken to meet Mr. Benedict, an odd, genial and green plaid-clad genius who offers them the chance to become secret agents, and carry out a very dangerous mission whose outcome quite possibly will decide the future of every human on Earth. They become the Mysterious Benedict Society.
Mr. Benedict and his team explain to the children that they have detected and are tracking strange messages being transmitted subliminally during regular television and radio broadcasts. The messages, which are delivered by children, seem to consist of nonsensical statements … THE MISSING AREN’T MISSING, THEY’RE ONLY DEPARTED… POISON APPLES. POISON WORMS… The messages vary, but they appear to cloud the mind of just about everyone who hears them. The international Emergency that has dominated news headlines for months seems to have been created by these messages, and Mr. Benedict can only speculate, and worry, about what the ultimate purpose of these messages might be.
Mr. Benedict’s team has tracked the messages to the Learning Institute for the Very Enlightened, founded by a Dutch scientist named Ledroptha Curtain, which is situated on Nomansan Island, just across from Stonetown Harbor. The four children are enrolled as students at the Institute and soon find themselves learning a series bewilderingly contradictory school rules, and learning lessons that, at least initially, appear to make no sense whatsoever. But the members of the Mysterious Benedict Society meet in secret after lights out every night, to discuss their findings, and to report those findings to Mr. Benedict’s team by flashlight and Morse code, and slowly, horrifyingly, start to make sense of Ledroptha Curtain’s plans.
The Mysterious Benedict Society is a thrilling adventure story about four solitary and abandoned children who discover that, by pooling their talents and working together, they can achieve the impossible. It is a tale full of mazes, puzzles and riddles that will have the reader working hard along side Reynie, Sticky, Kate and Constance to figure things out before it’s too late. Trenton Lee Stewart’s book is the first in a series of (almost) three titles, which include The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey, and the forthcoming The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
FernFolio Editor

The Thief Lord by Cornelia Funke

fernfolio — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 17:58:02 +0000

Following the death of their mother, fifteen-year old Prosper takes his five-year old brother, Bo, and sneaks onto a train bound for Venice, a place neither boy has ever visited but that looms large in both their imaginations because of their mother’s stories. He is desperate to get them far from Germany and their aunt Esther Hartlieb, who is determined to adopt the angelic-looking Bo, but who is not interested in his teenaged brother.
Once in Venice, the boys are taken in by a gang of street kids who live in an abandoned cinema, and survive by picking the pockets of wealthy tourists and with the help and support of the mysterious Thief Lord. The Thief Lord, no more than a teenager himself, calls himself Scipio and supplies them with money and goods, some of the profits of his thefts from the great palazzos of Venice. Scipio doesn’t live with the others in the cinema but arrives, masked and cloaked in a black cape, to pay them visits there at odd hours of the night, bringing money and food and books and clothes.
Prosper and Bo rapidly grow accustomed to their new lives with Ricco, Mosca, and Hornet, and come to love Venice, an ancient city of maze-like streets and canals built on a series of islands in the Adriatic off the northeast coast of Italy. Though Prosper worries about his friends’ illegal activities and constantly lives in fear of being found by aunt Esther, Bo revels in the freedom and adventure of their new lives.
Then one day, Prosper bumps into a man with a walrus moustache, a man who takes a good look at him, and then seems to follow when he and the boys start making their way back to the cinema for the evening. The man, a detective named Victor Getz, has been hired by Prosper and Bo’s aunt Esther to find Bo so that she can take him back to Germany. Prosper and his friends lose the stranger, but the boy’s suspicions grow when he sees the man standing at the water taxi dock, as their boat puts out into the Grand Canal. Fearing the worst, Prosper disguises himself and Bo, and gets Ricco and the others to help him keep Bo from view, yet Victor proves more than a match for a handful of ragtag street kids and their elusive teenaged protector.
Burdened with providing for and protecting his friends, as well as growing personal troubles of his own, Scipio needs a lot of money. When he and his gang are offered a fortune by an elderly Conte to steal a broken wing made of wood from a private house in Venice, Scipio accepts the strange request but, before the theft can be carried out, an unexpected revelation rocks the Thief Lord’s gang and threatens the safety of every one of the kids living in the Stella cinema. The burglary doesn’t go according to plan. Caught by Ida Spavento, the woman who owns the house, and the wooden wing, pursued by Victor Getz, and his client, Esther Hartlieb, and hunted by the local police, the gang must pull together all of their resources to save themselves and their friends.
Written by the wonderful Cornelia Funke, The Thief Lord is a magical tale that explores the themes of family and friendship, poverty and wealth, and childhood and old age against the richly detailed backdrop of Venice, one of the proudest and most beautiful cities in the world.
FernFolio Editor

Eye of the Crow by Shane Peacock

fernfolio — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 00:04:37 +0000

Capital of England and the 19th century world, the proud and beautiful city of London of the late 1860s is also a city full of bigotry, hatred and despair, something young Sherlock Holmes knows only too well. The product of a runaway marriage between the daughter of a well-to-do country squire and a brilliant but impoverished Jewish university student, Sherlock has grown up in genteel and almost desperate poverty. While his father tends the birds at the Crystal Palace, his mother teaches singing lessons and takes in sewing. The two are clearly devoted to each other, and to their bright and observant son, but grown old before their time, ground down by their hard lives.
It is his parents’ fondest wish that Sherlock get a good education so that he can aspire to a more comfortable life than theirs, but the young teenager has not attended school in months, ever since he was attacked by school bullies who see in him an easy mark for their racist taunts. Instead, he spends his days in Trafalgar Square, observing the people around him, and honing his almost eery ability to read in their faces and mannerisms, speech and clothing, the most intimate details of their lives.
After reading about the murder of a young woman in Whitechapel and the subsequent arrest of Mohammad Adalji, a young Arab butcher, Sherlock’s curiosity takes him to Old Bailey for the arraignment of the accused killer. A long-time victim of anti-Semitic epithets and well versed in the vicious impulses of a bloodthirsty mob, Sherlock finds himself feeling a certain sympathy for the accused and, when the young man sees him in the crowd and whispers to the boy, “I didn’t do it!”, Sherlock decides that he will have to save Adalji from the hangman’s noose.
Observed by police when he visits the site of the murder, Sherlock finds that he himself has fallen under suspicion. Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard has decided that he and Adalji were working together robbing people the night that the young woman was murdered, and soon Sherlock is running for his life, determined to stay out of police custody and to find the real killer before Adalji’s, and his own, time runs out.
Eye of the Crow is a story about a brilliant and complicated young man whose skills and attitudes have been indelibly marked by the circumstances of his birth and upbringing. Beautifully written and richly detailed, this novel will challenge young readers to think about the effects of prejudice both on the people of Sherlock’s world and of our own.
FernFolio Editor

Out of the Cold by Norah McClintock

fernfolio — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 17:22:10 +0000

Worried and hurt when her boyfriend Nick takes off without a word to anyone, Robyn Hunter decides, after some fruitless searching, that she needs to find a new preoccupation in life. Her friend Billy, a dedicated do-gooder, suggests that she volunteer at a local drop-in centre for homeless people and so Robyn finds herself helping out in the kitchen there, baking thirty-six dozen cookies on her first day. At the centre, Robyn meets the director, Mr. Donovan, Betty, the cook, and some of the centre’s clients, including the sweet and shy Andrew and the rather scary Mr. Duffy. She also meets Ben, another volunteer, who takes one look at her new boots and her expensive coat and sneeringly labels her a two-four, a twenty-four hour wonder who turns up once to get in some community service hours or as a sop to their conscience at Christmas.
Goaded by Ben’s attitude and unable to say no to Billy or Mr. Donovan, Robyn finds herself returning to the drop-in centre to help with their Christmas preparations. She wins the cautious approval of Ben, only to lose it again after she is attacked by a client intent upon taking food from the kitchen’s storeroom and reports the assault to the police, which results in the man being barred from the drop-in centre just as the weather turns very cold. Tragedy strikes when the man freezes to death in an empty alley.
Though her friends and parents tell her that it is not her fault, Robyn is convinced that, by speaking to the police, she is responsible for the homeless man’s death. Looking for a concrete way to deal with her guilt and grief, she approaches the contemptuous Ben, who informs her that he wants to hold a memorial service for the dead man, but that no one seems to have known much about him. Assigned the job of learning who this man was, Robyn interviews clients at the drop-in centre, haunts the man’s regular spot outside a downtown office building, and makes the acquaintance of someone who just might hold the clues to his identity. In the process, Robyn discovers far more about both the dead man, the clients and volunteers at the drop-in centre, and the problem of homelessness than she could have ever anticipated.
The fourth in Norah McClintock’s Robyn Hunter mysteries, Out of the Cold is a suspenseful and fast-paced adventure, that will keep the reader engaged to the final, and unexpected, revelation.
Out of the Cold won the 2009 Red Maple Fiction prize.
FernFolio Editor

The Vampire’s Visit by David A. Poulsen

fernfolio — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 13:54:11 +0000

Twelve year-old Christine Bellamy has been invited by her best friend, Pepper McKenzie, to join her and her parents on a trip to England. That’s the good part. The bad part is that Pepper’s parents have invited her younger brother, Hal, to come as well, and Hal is loud, obnoxious and nosy.
The trip gets off to a strange start when Christine, Hal and Pepper make the acquaintance of Mr. Cubbington-Smith, an old friend of Mr. McKenzie’s, with whom they will be staying for the first two weeks of their holiday. Mr. Cubbington-Smith, who lives in a beautiful old manor house just outside of London, wears a necklace of garlic cloves and, when asked, explains that it’s to protect him from vampires. Pepper and Hal and even Pepper’s parents laugh at this, but Christine notices that the former army colonel seems perfectly serious. Mr. Cubbington-Smith has also protected his home from vampires, hanging garlands of garlic at every door and window, except the window of Christine and Pepper’s bedroom.
Then, one evening, after a busy day of sightseeing, the two girls are startled when a strange young man appears in their room. Dressed in a coat, waistcoat and pantaloons, he looks like he’s stepped down from one of the paintings on the wall, but, by his pale complexion, Christine and Pepper know he’s a vampire. Simon Chelling has come to the girls for their assistance. He and his fellow vampires, the girls learn, have existed for centuries, keeping to the shadows, and careful to drink only from those who are violent or dangerous, thereby, Simon claims, performing a public service to humans by ridding society of criminals. But a small group of renegade vampires has decided they are tired of hiding and tired of protecting humans, and has hired themselves out as assassins. Simon Chelling believes Mr. Cubbington-Smith is working for the renegade vampires, and wants Christine and Pepper to spy on him.
When the girls refuse to get involved, fearing the consequences of getting mixed up with the undead, Simon and his fellow vampires kidnap Hal. So begins a thrilling and, at times, comical adventure that takes the three kids into hidden tunnels and secret passages, over garden walls, and, quite literally, out onto a limb!
The Vampire’s Visit is the first of David A. Poulsen’s Salt and Pepper Chronicles!
FernFolio Editor