Kite Street Detective School

A mystery puzzle book for children of about 8 to 12, and the grown-ups who like to solve alongside them.

Kite Street is a small, busy street with a bakery, a café, a kite museum, a park with a pond, and a goat called Biscuit who eats everything. Things keep going missing. Inspector Ruby Hale, a retired detective, runs a Detective School on the corner, and your child is her newest student.

The book teaches deduction one skill at a time, from the very first clue. Nobody gets hurt and there are no murders: the mysteries are a vanished pie, a runaway kite, balloons let go, a coded note in a lunchbox, a smiley face drawn in the dust.

How it works

• Eight lessons, one skill each. Each lesson starts with a page that explains the skill in plain words, with a small worked picture of it.
• A training case, solved together. In lessons 1 to 7 your child tries a training case first, then turns the page to see Inspector Ruby solve it step by step.
• Three cases to solve alone, from warm-up to tough, marked with one, two or three magnifying glasses.
• The Big Case: The Golden Kite, in four parts, uses every skill in the book.
• Two hints for every case at the back, so a stuck child gets a nudge, not the answer.
• Every answer with the full reasoning, step by step, plus a filled-in grid, timeline, map or table where it helps, so a wrong answer can be traced to the exact slip.

The eight skills

1. Look, then cross out: ruling suspects out from a picture line-up
2. The detective grid: who was where, with what
3. Timelines and alibis: who had a gap in their proof
4. Maps and trails: grid squares, compass directions, following a route
5. Who is fibbing? True-or-false reasoning with a rule
6. In what order? Lines, races and seats
7. Secret messages: backwards writing, number codes and shift codes
8. Use everything: cases that need two skills at once

What makes it different

• Every case has exactly one answer. Each one was checked by a computer program that tries every possibility, and every clue was checked against the answer.
• Everything needed is on the page. No case depends on a fact a child would have to know already.
• A whole street to get to know. Sixteen recurring people appear in full-color line-up pictures with their hats, glasses, boots and the things in their hands, plus a map of Kite Street divided into lettered and numbered squares.
• Written for this age. Short sentences and everyday words: the case stories average a US grade 3.3 reading level on the Flesch-Kincaid scale.

What you download

• Kite Street Detective School (82 pages, PDF, US Letter, full color, with bookmarks): welcome, how the book works, a page for grown-ups, the map, Who's Who, the line-ups, 8 lessons, 31 cases, the Big Case, hints, answers and a detective certificate.
• Case Notebook (12 pages, PDF): blank working pages to print: 3 by 3, 4 by 4 and three-way grids, timelines, two copies of the map, true-or-false tables, line boxes, code keys and message boxes, cut-out suspect cards and a spare certificate. Use it to solve a case twice or give a friend their own go.

Good to know

• Start at Lesson 1, even confident readers: each lesson's trick is used again later.
• Younger or newer readers may like a grown-up to read the case file aloud while they do the thinking.
• The pages are US Letter size. On A4 paper, print with "fit to page". You can also solve on screen with a notebook beside you.
• This is a PDF download. No physical book is shipped.