Friday Barnes: Collision Course by R.A. Spratt

Friday’s Mum, the Nobel Prize winning physicist, has been accused of espionage. The police think she’s been selling secrets about the CERN Hadron Super Collider.

Friday knows her mother isn’t capable of such a thing – this is a woman who can’t even operate a dishwasher. She’s got to smuggle herself into Switzerland to clear her Mum’s name. Fortunately, Melanie is a master of disguise.

After an extremely extreme make-over, Friday arrives at CERN and finds axolotls in the water coolers, graffiti in the great hall and most baffling of all – her sister has fallen in love with an engineer! Can Friday solve these mysteries? Can she keep her family out of prison? And can she recognise Ian if he shaves his head?

~*~

Previously in Friday Barnes…Friday, undercover Interpol agent, heads off to Paris as an arts student with Melanie under Uncle Bernie and Agent Okeke’s supervision to find out who stole the Mona Lisa – and of course, along the way, Friday has to solve lots of smaller crimes, and then she is under arrest again.

And this time, her adventure takes her to CERN in Switzerland – to help her mother – a Nobel Prize winning physicist accused of espionage. And so, Friday, Ian and Melanie don disguises and go on the run from Paris to Switzerland to help Friday’s mother, aided by CERN’s lawyer, Ms Dekker. When Friday hears that her mother has supposedly sold secrets about the Hardon Super Collider, Friday hurls herself into action. Preposterous, Friday says. Her mother is quite brilliant, but organising spying is not something she can do – in fact, Friday regularly points out that despite her family’s brilliance, they do struggle with daily activities – she says her mother can barely operate a dishwasher! Even her older siblings, Halley and Quantam cannot be pulled away when she begs them for help, though Quantam seemed to be a bit more in touch with more than his research at times than the others.

And so, Friday and Melanie set about working to help Friday’s genius but scatterbrained mother, and clear her name. And they are legally in charge of her, as Friday has been deemed to be the most responsible person in her family. Yep, a fifteen-year-old is more responsible, more worldly, and more empathetic than her parents and five older siblings. Well, this is a stroke of genius, because apart from Melanie, Ms Dekker, and Uncle Bernie, having Friday as the most responsible person in her family, because it highlights the journey that Friday has been on since we first met her, and shows how different she is to her family. Plus, she’s a genius. I loved that she was constantly reminding her siblings that Dr Barnes was also Mum, because it gave us a glimpse into her humanity and growth – the way she has become much more than her genius we meet at the start of the series.

The twelfth book builds on what has come before, and follows the classic themes of a larger crime surrounded by smaller ones and eventually, a robot race that builds to the climax – well, a true to form Friday Barnes climax that sheds light on what has really happened and how things are being stolen. Of course, no Friday Barnes book is ever complete without Ian and Melanie, even though Ian takes a backseat in this book due to amnesia. So Friday and Melanie and their flaws are at the heart of the action, cementing their dedication to each other as friends and a fantastic Sherlock and Watson pair with a unique difference, well many unique differences that make me laugh. It’s a great crime series for middle grade readers and above, and I love how R.A. Spratt plays on the tropes that everyone knows well from crime stories across the board, and creating a world that has lively and realistic characters who inhabit this world, where it seems like odd things happen, but for all we know, things like this might happen and we just don’t hear about it.

I have loved Friday Barnes since I first picked it up, and can’t wait to see where Friday goes next.