The Official Agatha Christie After School Detectives Club: 50 Mystery Puzzles for Children by Agatha Christie Ltd, Dr Gareth Moore, Laura Jayne Ayres

Title: The Official Agatha Christie After School Detectives Club: 50 Mystery Puzzles for Children

Author: Agatha Christie Ltd, Dr Gareth Moore, Laura Jayne Ayres

Genre: Crime, puzzle

Publisher: Hachette Australia

Published: 28^th October 2025

Format: Paperback

Pages: 154

Price: $26.99

Synopsis: Bringing the thrilling and mysterious world of Agatha Christie to a new generation of puzzle-solving, code-cracking detectives!

With fifty mystery puzzles for budding detectives!

From a crisis on a cruise ship to a country house poisoning and a treacherous train journey, there’s something perilously exciting for every budding detective to solve!

* Created in collaboration with the official Agatha Christie estate
* Bringing the thrilling and mysterious world of Agatha Christie to a new generation of puzzle-solving, code-cracking detectives.
* For children aged 8 and up

~*~

Middle grade readers are hungry for mystery, and it is definitely showing in a lot of the books I have been reading lately. They’ve covered so many different ways of approaching mystery in creative and diverse ways, and one of the latest books is very a very clever puzzle book. The Official Agatha Christie After School Detectives Club: 50 Mystery Puzzles for Children, from Agatha Christie Ltd, Dr Gareth Moore and Laura Jayne Ayres is a cool way to introduce readers to Agatha Christie with puzzles and a fun narrative throughout.

Join the After School Detectives Club – Luka, Quentin, Agnes and Sophia, who got together to solve mysteries after Agnes introduced them to Agatha Christie’s novels. They’ve got five cases to solve, each with ten puzzles for readers to complete, and become puzzle-solving, code-cracking detectives. They’re at manors, on trains, and on ships or at resorts to help solve thefts and poisonings in classic Agatha Christie style.

It’s a fun book that kids can fill in and play with and work out how to solve the crimes along the way. I had a go at some of it on a spare bit of paper or mentally, and it was lots of fun to see how I went, and how I was able to work things out. It’s the kind of book that can keep kids entertained over the holidays, to get them away from screens, and to give them a chance to flex their thinking in fun ways, and in a way that they enjoy. It’s really fun and can help build storytelling skills as well.

I’m enjoying seeing these interactive books come out, because they can connect readers with all sorts of stories. I think it is very cleverly done, and what I loved about it is that solving the crimes was done without technology. The kids had to examine things without their phones. In a world where people are so reliant on technology to solve things, and where it plays such a huge part in crime shows, I feel like it is refreshing when modern audiences get to solve crimes without a phone. Showing it is possible, especially in middle grade books is what I think has made so many of these recent books work so well.

So grab a pencil and your crime solving mates, and spend some time with The After School Detectives Club this summer.