Where would you like to find a dead body?!

Aggie Morton, Mystery Queen: The Body Under the Piano

Written by: Marthe Jocelyn

Illustrated by: Isabelle Follath

Published by: Anderson Press @AndersenPress

Published on: April 2025

Price: £7.99

First line: I will tell first about making a new friend and save the dead body for later.

Genre: Mystery/Detective Fiction

Age: 9+

Thanks to Toppsta for the review copy.

What’s it all about? Aggie Morton, named by the author for her love of Agatha Christie, is a child who has a love of detection and murder. Perfectly, for her, she soon discovers a dead body under a piano and tries, with little luck at first, to discover who the murderer is. As well as being hampered by her lack of knowledge (this is her first dead body), she is also forced to do most of her investigative work in secret as it is not deemed fit for a young girl in this age to be investigating a murder. However, she does have the help of a foreign friend: Hector Perot. The story is set in Torquay, Devon, the childhood home town of Agatha Christie.

Why should I read it? If you are a fan of detective fiction, then this is a great book to read. If you are new to the genre, this is also a great place to start, as it shows you the genre in all its beauty. The characters are well crafted and the story continues at a good pace. You can tell the author has done lots of research about this time period as many of the small facts and actions really fit well. I personally love detective fiction and have read many Agatha Christie books. I can see where this author is coming from and it’s a great idea to imagine what perhaps Agatha was a little like as a child and perhaps what she may have been like if she had indeed discovered a murder! However, for some reason, I did find this book a little hard to keep reading, no matter how many times I came back to it. Perhaps, there were just too many characters for me and it needed to be more of the locked room type mystery that Agatha Christie was famous for. But, that’s just a personal opinion, I would still highly recommend it for this genre.