A Girl Called Justice

About A Girl Called Justice

Elly Griffiths's only series for younger readers sends eleven-year-old Justice Jones to Highbury House, a boarding school for the "Daughters of Gentlefolk" on the edge of a Sussex marsh, after the death of her mother. Justice is a super-smart, super-observant sleuth in the Golden Age tradition -- equal parts Nancy Drew and a young Miss Marple -- who can't help noticing the things adults miss: a missing maid, a suspicious new teacher, a body that shouldn't be where it is. Griffiths sets the series in the 1930s, with the shadow of the coming Second World War lengthening across the school as the books progress, and gives Justice a small, loyal circle of friends and a genuine detective's eye rather than a formulaic school-story sidekick role.

Across four books, Highbury House hosts a body found in the snow, a haunted-seeming smugglers' lodge, a literal ghost in the walled garden, and finally the arrival of an evacuated boys' school as war breaks out in 1939 -- each mystery grounded in real period detail about servants, class and the closing world of interwar English boarding schools. It's recognizably Griffiths's voice at child-reader scale: atmospheric setting, a fair-play puzzle plot, and a heroine whose cleverness is never undercut by the adults around her. Fans of her adult mysteries will recognize the same instinct for making place and period do real narrative work; young readers get a properly plotted whodunit that doesn't talk down to them.