Detention Becomes the Least Dangerous School Mystery
An Irish boarding school murder gives this YA mystery a strong contained world. The hook is playful but dangerous: friendship, detention, humour and clues all colliding in a setting where adults may be less useful than the students investigating. That makes it fun.
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Death Before Detention
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Detention Becomes the Least Dangerous School Mystery
An Irish boarding school murder gives this YA mystery a strong contained world. The hook is playful but dangerous: friendship, detention, humour and clues all colliding in a setting where adults may be less useful than the students investigating. That makes it fun.
- Book Synopsis
-
This is the story of how we;
- Discovered a dead body, - Rediscovered that same dead body, - Launched an investigation, - Discovered yet another dead body, - Battled mean girls, feral bats, and nearly destroyed our three-year friendship all in the noble pursuit of solving a complex murder.
Let’s get started then.
Mae Flynn is used to the chaos of her rural Irish Catholic boarding school, Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, but she isn’t expecting to discover a dead body in the school kitchen. To make matters worse, the hapless victim, Conor Haddock, was the previous owner of the school building and had recently been talking about selling up, alongside getting on the bad side of seemingly every adult Mae knows. In other words: the suspects are endless.
Along with her best friends, the self-named Common Criminal Club, Mae is determined to solve the murder. But the more she uncovers, the more she begins to suspect that everyone around her is hiding something. Soon it’s not only her lessons and friendships at stake, but her very life…
Ideal for readers who:
- Connect with funny murder mysteries with a sharp teenage voice and boarding-school chaos.
- Make time for amateur investigations involving friendship drama and messy clues.
- Warm to Irish-set YA crime that balances comedy with a real whodunnit.
- Follow cases where solving the crime may wreck the friendships holding everything together.
- About The Author
- Alison Weatherby is a middle-grade, teen and YA mystery writer who lives outside of Dublin, Ireland. A winner of Chicken House Books' Open Coop competition, Alison's debut novel was The Secrets Act, a historical YA mystery set at Bletchley Park during WW2. The Secrets Act won the Redhill Academy Trust Book Award and was shortlisted for the Young Quills Award. The Common Criminals' Club is her first book for MG readers. When she's not reading or writing about murders, she visits schools to teach kids how to write them. She enjoys reading, running, and hitting things at the boxing gym. Alison lives with her husband, two daughters, and a very goofy lurcher named Greta.
- Product Details
-
- ISBN
- 9781035084319
- Format
- Paperback
- Publisher
- Macmillan Children's Books, (25 June 2026)
- Number of Pages
- 272
- Language
- English
- Dimensions
- 197 x 130 mm
- Series:
- See all books in this series
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