Eleven-year-old Zaiba is obsessed with crime. Her Aunt Fouzia runs a detective agency back in Karachi and has turned Zaiba on to the brilliant Eden Lockett Mysteries. She has every book in the series – and the quilt cover, and the phone case. All she needs now is a crime to solve…
In book one, Zaiba is attending a family Mehndi party at The Grand Royal Star Hotel when she hears that the prized Italian Greyhound of a famous actress has gone missing from the star’s suite. With the help of her best friend and her little brother, the amateur sleuth manages to foil the petnapping plot and save the day
In book two, Zaiba can't wait for the school summer fair where she's going to run a detective trail to help train other potential agents! But when the head teacher is poisoned during the highly competitive cake competition, Zaiba s own skills are put to the test. With a whole host of suspects and a busy crime scene, Zaiba needs to stay focused if she s going to get to the bottom of the cake catastrophe.
My Thoughts
Amateur detectives and mystery solvers everywhere are going to adore Agent Zaiba's stories, and also the fabulous extra material at the back - detective tips, memory tests, fingerprint kit instructions, secret codes and fact files.
The stories themselves are short, the plots span a couple of days so are manageable to get your head around and the mysteries will be fun to solve. The books would work well for free readers, to read with an adult (Daniela Sosa has done some lovely illustrations to support the story and further involve the reader) or as a bedtime story, solving the mysteries together.
I very much hope there are lots more mysteries in the pipeline for Agent Zaiba to investigate.