By Derek Landy
A wisecracking skeleton detective and a twelve-year-old girl team up to stop a sorcerer from unmaking the world.
When Stephanie Edgley's beloved uncle Gordon, a horror novelist, dies suddenly and strangely, she inherits his house and his secrets, and meets Skulduggery Pleasant: a living, talking skeleton in a sharp suit and hat, who happens to be a detective and a sorcerer. It turns out Gordon was murdered, and the magical world he wrote about is real, hidden just under the ordinary one. A vicious sorcerer named Nefarian Serpine is hunting an ancient weapon that could end everything, and Stephanie, who takes the name Valkyrie and starts learning magic of her own, is suddenly right in his way. What follows is fireballs, monsters, narrow escapes, and a nonstop stream of banter between a fearless girl and a skeleton who's very hard to kill.
The pace is the whole reason this works on a screen-age child: the scenes are short, the dialogue is fast and funny, and Landy writes action the way a good movie shoots it, so a reluctant reader keeps going because it never feels like homework. The Skulduggery-and-Valkyrie double act, one deadpan skeleton, one gutsy girl, is the hook, and their banter carries the child right over the scary parts. And it's the opening of a long, beloved series, so a child who clicks with it has book after book waiting.