By Kate Milford
The old inn should be empty for the holidays. Instead five strangers turn up in the snow, all with something to hide, and Milo has to work out why they've really come.
Milo's parents run Greenglass House, an old smugglers' inn perched high above the town, and he's counting on a slow, quiet Christmas at home. Then the doorbell rings. It keeps ringing. Five odd guests come stamping in out of the snow, and not one of them will say the real reason they're there. When small things start going missing, Milo and Meddy, the cook's daughter, turn the whole thing into a game and start investigating. What they find is a knot of old secrets wrapped around the house, and around Milo himself.
It's a real mystery, with clues and suspects and red herrings and an ending that clicks satisfyingly into place. What it leaves out is the scary stuff that usually rides along with the genre. Nobody dies, nobody's in real danger, and there's no villain who'll give your child nightmares. The suspense lives entirely in the guessing: who's lying, what's hidden, how the pieces connect. And the snowed-in inn is so warm that reading it feels like being tucked under a blanket while you sort the puzzle out. If you've got a child who loves a mystery but isn't ready for the frightening ones, this is the one I'd reach for.