Sparky of Bunker Hill and the Cold Kid Case by Rosalind Barden
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sparky is eleven and today is her birthday, she hasn’t had much luck on birthdays in the past, on one, her mother died, on the other, her guardians up and left her and today is no different. All Sparky wants is to do is crack open her lockbox full of sweets and watch the sunrise over the park, but instead she finds a little girl on the bench and it turns out she is dead!

Sparky is scared out of her wits and in her shock, she drops the candy tin and runs away, the next thing she knows is that the police have found the girl and her tin and because of what she has written inside the lid, she is now wanted for murder, with a reward on her head and has to go on the run. Unfortunately for Sparky, everyone who she classed as a friend seems to be in it for the reward and tattle to the cops, so she decides to go up Bunker Hill to somewhere she knows they won’t expect to find her.

This is how she finds some safety with the unlikely pair who live there, or at least safe enough that she can hide out until all of this is over, however, the papers want the opposite, they want to blame a whole host of other crimes on her as well, most of which she didn’t even commit!

Will she be able to figure out who killed that little girl and why so that she can clear her name, and will she be able to trust her unusual saviours, or will the mobsters, street kids or the other unsavoury characters she knows turn her in before she even has the chance? This is a historical novel which shows Depression Era Los Angeles from a perspective which not many would, all while weaving a mystery around characters who could well have been real in this quirky book.

Reviewed by @roxsannel

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