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Eleven-year-old Sesame Seade has been waiting all her life to be a super sleuth, so when a student journalist disappears and no-one seems all that bothered, she decides to solve the case herself. Can she track down the vanished girl before her parents work out what's going on?

Much of the credit for Sesame's fabulousness goes to author Clementine Beauvais, of course, for giving us a great set of characters - I really enjoyed the relationship with her mother, a college professor, and her father, a reverend, both of whom clearly love their daughter but find her rather challenging! - and a clever, original plot. I was intrigued by the solution to the mystery and it was a genuinely surprising one. Oh, there are also some fabulous one-liners - I think my favourite is ''Normally I would have followed Jesus's advice, since my dad works for his dad...'' As if that wasn't enough, it's also got enough throwaway comments referring to classics - as befits a book set at Cambridge university - to pique younger reader's curiosity about Narcissus, Scheherazade and many others, so you can even think of it as educational.