If your love for crime fiction began at an early age, it’s a fair bet that it started with the likes of The Famous Five, The Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew. The same applies to Tippy Chan, the 11-year-old heroine of RWR McDonald’s award winning The Nancys and the Case of the Missing Necklace.
The book was first published in McDonald’s native New Zealand in 2019, where it won the Ngaio Marsh Best Debut Award the same year. Now Tippy has been let loose on worldwide audiences and I’m sure they’re going to fall in love with her.
Like Ava Bonney, protagonist in Marie Tierney’s Deadly Animals and Miv and Sharon in last year’s CFL Best Debut Award winner, The List of Suspicious Things by Jennie Godfrey, (both also highly-rated debuts, incidentally) Tippy is a bright and inquisitive youngster who finds herself on the periphery of a terrible crime and must try to navigate her way through the aftermath.
But she’s a lucky girl, because in her corner are her Uncle Pike and his boyfriend Devon. They’re keen to get to the truth too, so together they form The Nancys, in honour of the books so beloved by little Tippy and Pike too. After all, the books she’s now reading so avidly have his name scrawled inside the tatty front covers.
Just before Tippy’s recently widowed mum goes off on a two-week cruise, Pike and Devon fly in from Sydney in to look after her. Pike, a hair stylist to A-listers, looks like a tattooed Santa Claus, while Devon is a fashion designer whose own clothes make him stand out in quiet little Riverstone, in South Otago. Together, they make quite a threesome, and it’s clear from the off that Uncle Pike has no intention of sticking to his sister’s parenting plan for Tippy.
When her friend Todd is involved in a mysterious fall, they take her to see him, but the boy is in a coma… and what was he doing on the town’s bridge anyway? It’s a mystery and there’s nothing better these two Nancy Drew fans and one hanger-on like than that. Add in the actual murder of Tippy’s teacher and soon the Nancys are on the case, finding all kinds of clues that have been ignored by the police.
So, we’re all set up for a rip-roaring whodunnit, but The Nancys… is about to surprise you. It deftly sidesteps many of the well worn clichés associated with the sub-genre and instead treats the reader to a Technicolor tale that both entertains and intrigues. First up in a veritable cornucopia of tasty reading morsels in the setting. Riversdale is small, quiet and populated with some deftly drawn characters, including Tippy’s neighbours Mr and Mrs Brown, their step-granddaughter Melanie, Tippy’s friend Sam and her cat Bunny Whiskers, and the creepy estate agent Duncan Nunn.
Secondly, in Uncle Pike and Devon, we have the class clowns whose back and forth banter creates some laugh-out-loud moments. Openly gay Pike left town years ago and has never wanted to return. He brings Tippy a bottle of The Glenlivet as a gift and hates the cat, while Devon loves Bunny Whiskers and spends much of the story pursuing her affections. They’re dippy and delightful – and best of all they allow Tippy to do what she does best, detecting.
You’d be amazed what a little girl can discover when nobody thinks she is listening! Amid all the high jinks, McDonald interweaves themes of grief, friendship and trying to fit in.
The Nancys and the Case of the Missing Necklace is like a sunny day in the depth of winter – very welcome and a joy to behold. It’s a book that will stay with me for a long while and I’m hoping against hope that Orenda has picked up the option for Nancy Business, second in the series. A definite contender for my top five books of the year.
Here’s a selection of other Kiwi crime authors to explore…
Orenda Books
Print/Kindle/iBook
£6.49
CFL Rating: 5 Stars
