Death at the Museum

I've previously read a couple of Janice Hallett's mystery novels for adults (I was shocked to realise that I read the last one three years ago!) and her gift for writing stories using unconventional media (text messages, audio transcripts, emails) is tailor-made for children's books, especially in these days of short attention spans! Death at the Museum is actually second in a series called A Box Full of Murders -- it was published this year and I found it in a street library. Luke and Ava are brother and sister, 10 and 11, and their father has given them a box full of documents which contains a mystery to solve. 

This story revolves around a school excursion to the Natural History Museum back in 1983 which ended with a mysterious death and lots of shenanigans, recorded partly by phone messages left between the museum staff, student notebooks and newspaper articles, which Luke and Ava use to track the events of the day and figure out what actually happened. There are locked lunch rooms, students climbing onto whales, stolen planets, people and animals apparently brought back from the dead, missing gems and misbehaving teachers to deal with.

Luke and Ava are separated during the holidays; I gather their parents split up in the previous book but are still on good terms, though they are dealing with difficult family issues and their dad's job is still a mystery. Why does he have these strange boxes in the attic anyway? That mystery is still to be solved. Death at the Museum is a lot of fun, aimed at upper primary students, and though it deals with murder, it's not very gory and an alert reader should be able to work out the clues along with Ava and Luke.