By Janice Hallett (pub. Puffin Books, 2025)
1983. A hot summer. Bright sunshine. Starry nights. No parents. A happy group of children enjoying a camping trip together. The perfect summer…
Except…
A terrible crime was committed and no one knows who did it.
Not then. Not now.
This is the note that Luke stumbles upon when he finds a box marked ‘Top Secret’ in his dad’s attic. The box contains letters, diary entries, reports and newspaper cuttings from a camping trip held at Chalfont Camp and Woods in 1983.
At first things seem normal – a couple of unusual things happen, but nothing to raise alarm. That’s until a dead body is found in a nearby cabin. As Luke and his sister Ava go through the contents of the box, they discover that the murder was never solved. Can they be the ones to crack it, decades later?
A Box Full of Murders is not your typical murder mystery, even for a children’s book. Not only is the murder old – a cold case in fact – but our protagonists are not actually together to solve it!
Luke (10) and Ava (11, and boy will she not let Luke forget it) are in different places when Luke finds the box. Their parents have recently separated, so Luke is at their dad’s while Ava is at their mum’s.
For reasons unknown, their dad doesn’t want Luke to look in the box, meaning that he must secretly grab a handful of pages at a time, sending photos of them to his sister with his mobile. For the reader, this means that we get copies of the documents that are sent, punctuated by the text messages between Ava and Luke as they read through the pages themselves and formulate their theories.
The papers tell the story of a camping trip attended by a few Boy Scout and Girl Guide groups in 1983. Luke and Ava are reading it in the modern day, and I’ll confess when they first saw the date and referred to “the 1900s” (not technically incorrect) and “ancient documents”, I did rather feel my soul leave my body. This won’t be an issue for kids reading today of course, and likely reflects their actual thoughts…welp, there goes my soul again.
(On that note, without spoilers, there is an important clue that I worked out early-ish on using a trick we all learned at school…it seems that the trick is no longer a common thing, which was interesting to find out!)
I enjoyed working things out alongside Ava and Luke. There are things mentioned in the old documents that seem obvious to me as an adult, but of course would mean nothing to kids today. Hallett neatly explains these by having Ava look things up and send pictures or definitions to Luke – a smart way to keep the documents feeling older, but make the book itself more accessible to modern readers.
I loved the style of writing, using diary entries, incident reports, lost property forms, letters, etc. I think it’s a great way to draw readers into a story – it makes you pay closer attention than if it was simply written in prose. It’s easy to get swept up and away in mystery stories, but this one truly encourages you to focus and solve it alongside the main characters.
The kids in 1983 were asked to keep daily diary entries, which means that we get a blow-by-blow account of what’s happening in the camp and the woods. What I really love about this method is that there are entries from the different tent ‘groups’, so we get to read things from multiple points-of-view. It’s an ingenious way to get around a first-person narrative, giving us insight into individual situations but still allowing us an overarching view to put everything together.
What’s also intriguing is the occasional note in the box meant to help the reader – and Luke and Ava – along. These ‘progress reports’ encourage you to think about certain questions, to look at things you might have missed, and to consider the broader context of the situation. Now all we need to know is: who left them there‽
I’m already a fan of Hallett’s adult writing, but murder mysteries can be a difficult one to do for children. Safe to say that she achieves it with aplomb, giving us a whodunnit that offsets a grim scenario with humour, while keeping anything too grisly at a distance for the main characters (and young readers!). It’s her trademark to write stories through multiple “mediums”, and it’s great to see how well it works for a different age group.
A Box Full of Murders is a well-balanced story, with some twists you can solve and some that you won’t see coming. And the good news is that there are more boxes in the kids’ dad’s attic, which means there will be more mysteries to solve in the future! We can’t wait to see what the mysterious note-maker has left for Ava and Luke stumble onto next.
If you want to help Luke and Ava solve the mystery, you can grab a copy of A Box Full of Murders at the link below.
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Looking for more mystery stories? You can check out our previous reviews here.
