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    A Pocket Full of Murder
    A Pocket Full of Murder
    A Pocket Full of Murder
    Ebook273 pages4 hours

    A Pocket Full of Murder

    By R. J. Anderson

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    A determined young girl joins forces with an adventure-loving street boy to save her father’s life in this “thoroughly entertaining” (Kirkus Reviews) magical murder mystery.

    In the spell-powered city of Tarreton, the wealthy have all the magic they desire while the working class can barely afford a simple spell to heat their homes. Twelve-year-old Isaveth is poor, but she’s also brave, loyal, and zealous in the pursuit of justice—which is lucky, because her father has just been wrongfully arrested for murder.

    Isaveth is determined to prove his innocence. Quiz, the eccentric, eyepatch-wearing street boy who befriends her, swears he can’t resist a good mystery. Together they set out to solve the magical murder of one of Tarreton’s most influential citizens and save Isaveth’s beloved Papa from execution. But is Quiz truly helping Isaveth out of friendship, or does he have hidden motives of his own?
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAtheneum Books for Young Readers
    Release dateSep 8, 2015
    ISBN9781481437738
    A Pocket Full of Murder
    Author

    R. J. Anderson

    R. J. Anderson isn't trying to hide that she's female, she just thinks initials look more writerly. According to her mother she started reading at the age of two; all she knows is that she can't remember a single moment of her life when she wasn't obsessed with stories. She grew up reading C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, watching Doctor Who from behind the sofa, and hanging out in her brothers' comic book shop. Now she writes novels about knife-wielding faeries, weird science, and the numinous in the modern world. Quicksilver, her latest novel, also has soldering and pancakes.

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    Reviews for A Pocket Full of Murder

    4.5/5

    20 ratings3 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A mystery about politics, power, poverty and religious prejudice set in a city powered by magic spells.In the Breck household there isn't enough money to buy meat, let alone much-needed new shoes for Isaveth and her sisters. Isaveth's older sister has a factory job, and Isaveth tries baking spells to sell. But when her father is accused of murder, their circumstances become even more desperate. Isaveth takes inspiration from her favourite heroine Auradia and sets out to prove his innocence, with the help of her new friend, an eccentric street boy called Quiz.The library only had this as audiobook CDs, which I found a little cumbersome, and I took while to get into the story simply because I wasn’t listening to it often enough. I took a while to warm to the narrator, too. I liked her accent and the voices she gave characters, but she has a very animated way of reading, and although that suits a twelve year old protagonist, at first it felt a bit patronising, like the narrator was assuming that the listener was also only twelve...Anyway, I enjoyed this, and became steadily more engrossed as the story progressed. By the end I was listening to it at every chance I got. Now to find the sequel.
    • 4/5
      Ever since her mother died and her father lost his contract Isaveth is trying very hard to deal with life, her sister had to drop out of school and go to work in a factory and Izaveth decides to try to help the family by making spell tablets. It's a world with an industrial revolution that also has magic and a nasty class structure. She makes friends with a street kid Quiz, who wears an eye-patch. Her family is also part of a minority religion who are distrusted and oppressed (and the women wear a prayer-shawl).As if all this Dickensian drama wasn't enough, her father is accused of being a murderer and taken away, in order to save the family Isaveth has to investigate and use all of her smarts to work out who is the enemy and what she can do to prove her father innocent, and the motive is twisty.I enjoyed it, it kept me up past my bedtime.
    • 3/5
      Nice little mystery with poverty, touches of larger social issues from religious persecution to government corruption, and magic. (I loved the spell baking parts, and wish there'd been more of those.)

    Book preview

    A Pocket Full of Murder - R. J. Anderson

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