Cockroach Whodunnit: Review of The Peski Kids: The Mystery of the Squashed Cockroach by R.A. Spratt

With a title like that, it’s easy to imagine what you’re in for. You also just know that this series is going to be a huge hit with kids who love a funny, quirky, slightly gross book.

The Peski Kids: The Mystery of the Squashed Cockroach also throws in spies, criminal masterminds and a father that builds helicopters for fun. This action-packed new offering from Australian author R. A Spratt of the highly popular Friday Barnes and Nanny Piggins series is sure to excite little imaginations.

The book opens with siblings Joe, Fin and April who are more than a little surprised to find that their mother – who they thought was a very boring palaeontologist – is actually an international super spy and has inadvertently found herself captured by Kolectiv and imprisoned somewhere in Eastern Europe. Subsequently, the three children are shuffled off to live with their highly anxious father who lives in an obscure country town called Currawong.

Aside from the obvious downside of having to leave your home and having your mother imprisoned, the kids haven’t seen their father for many years and have little memory of him. After discovering that his wife was a spy – by witnessing her break the noses, collarbones and knee caps of her assailants – he has developed extreme anxiety and tried to live a quiet life.

In Currawong, a place where they are obsessed with lawn bowls and the highlight of their social calendar is a highly contested cockroach race, Joe, Fin and April meet a series of highly entertaining characters: Loretta, their glamorous yet devious new neighbour, Matilda – April’s new arch enemy – and Mr Lang the long-suffering principal of Currawong High along with a host of others.

It appears however, that the Peski kids have well and truly got off on the wrong foot and despite trying to embrace lawn bowls and finding a cockroach to enter in the race, they are the first to be accused when cockroaches start mysteriously dying. Will they ever make friends and who is trying to sabotage the most important event on the Currawong calendar?

The Peski Kids: The Mystery of the Squashed Cockroach is the first instalment in a new series that is sure to thrill the 10 + reader and once they’re hooked, you can introduce them to all the other wonderful R. A. Spratt books.

Purchase a copy of The Peski Kids: The Mystery of the Squashed Cockroach | Read an extract | Read more from R.A. Spratt

R.A. Spratt is the author of The Peski Kids,Friday Barnes and The Adventures of Nanny Piggins. In her previous life she was a television writer. Unlike the Peski kids, R.A. Spratt never fights with her brother, but only because he moved to Hong Kong to get away from her. R.A. lives in Bowral, NSW, where she has three chickens, two goldfish and a dog. She also has a husband and two daughters.