Montgomery Bonbon: Murder at the Museum

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He is handy as a sidekick, too, and helps move the story forward beyond Bonbon’s lengthy monologues (which are frequent).The door to the room where the murder took place has been locked from the inside and the only other access is a window that opens onto the museum roof.

The illustrations by Claire Powell are fantastic art pieces, and they tell stories beyond the well-selected well-placed words in the book. The Montgomery Bonbon series is such a brilliantly comical series that I genuinely believe is equally enjoyable for both middle grade readers and adults alike. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

It also has a lot of heart, largely owing to Grandpa, but also because Bonnie is a really likeable main character - quite often young detectives tend to be irritating and entitled but Bonnie wasn't at all. Bonnie and Grandpa Banks are visiting the Hornville Museum – the oldest building in Widdlington – when there’s a dreadful scream and they are plunged into darkness. Bonnie Montgomery is just as good, and between them they're about three people's worth of amazing, with Mongomery's vaguely-Poirot inpsired protrayal and Bonnie's calm consideration and ability to connect the dots at a moment's notice. However when there’s a scream and a ‘ ghastly green glow‘ from the turret room, it seems there’s work to be done. This is the second children's book from Beckett-King, following on from Murder at the Museum, and I loved it too.

Upon visiting the Hornville Museum with its eclectic displays, Bonnie and Grampa end up discovering a murder! But they might have heard of the great Montgomery Bonbon, the well-dressed gentleman detective who (apart from the hat and moustache) looks suspiciously like a 10-year-old girl. Montgomery Bonbon and Grampa Banks make an excellent team and the age and experience of Banks definitely keeps Bonbon grounded and thinking clearly. She and her granddad have solved many together in the past (even if the police think of them more as troublesome elements), and manage to get people to talk more than they might as Bonnie becomes Montgomery Bonbon, a short but astute European detective with her own senior assistant. Bonnie Montgomery is finally getting a holiday from cracking cases as her alter-ego, Montgomery Bonbon, when something terribly fishy happens the moment she and Grampa Banks arrive on Odde Island – and it's not just the smell of the harbour.Claire Powell is a bestselling children’s book maker, character designer and illustrator who started out designing for television brands before she got her first book deal in 2016 and has never looked back. Claire Powell’s illustrations bring so much personality to the characters and elevate Montgomery Bonbon from a brilliant mystery to an iconic character. The child detective who is much smarter and more perceptive than the adults in charge, the colourful cast of suspects with their own secrets and shadowy motives, the strange and slightly gothic setting, and of course, crisps. Claire’s collaborations with Kes Gray and Simon Farnaby – The Night Before The Night Before Christmas ; The Night after Christmas ; The Wizard and Me – all topped the charts to become bestsellers. Many people go their whole lives without noticing anything that is afoot, amiss, or even untoward; without ever experiencing that toe-tingling, stomach-twisting sensation that a mystery is about to unfold.