The London Eye Mystery by Siobhan Dowd
Published- 5th June 2008
Publisher- Yearling
Pages- 336 pages (paperback)
Salim visits the London Eye with his cousins Kat and Ted. He goes up on the Eye, but when the pod gets back to the ground Salim is nowhere to be seen. How can someone disappear from a sealed pod on the London Eye? Where is Salim and what has happened to him? Will Kat and Ted work out the mystery?
This was a good novel as the blurb on the back of the novel really intrigued me when I first picked it up in a charity shop. I was wondering how someone could go missing from a sealed pod on the London Eye without anyone noticing. The novel was told by Ted who has a special condition in which he sees things differently from other people. He is obsessed with the weather and different weather conditions. Ted said his brain works on a different wavelength from other people. It was good to see the story told from the perspective of a 12 year old boy. He teamed up with his older sister Kat to find out what happened to their cousin Salim and try to find him.
Ted and Kat were great main characters as I loved reading the story from a child's point of view rather than an adults. They would go anywhere in London just to find clues as to what happened. They even spoke to people they had never met before to try to find out the mystery. Salim was a good character aswell as he just wanted to be with his friends and he was also a brave character because of what happened in the novel.
The end of the novel was a good twist because you didn't see it coming. You thought there could only be a few events that could have actually happened like he was kidnapped, killed, killed himself or something else happened. I always knew that Ted would work out the mystery as to what had happened to his cousin though. The story started with Salim going missing and then it went to 24 hours before that event occurred. The whole story only took place within the space of about 4 or 5 days.
Some of the language was quite long as it featured a lot of meteorological terms as that is the job Ted wants to do when he is older. It was also good seeing how Ted's brain worked and how he worked through the clues. He was a person who could remember anything that people said, or things he saw, or theories he worked out. Kat would go out on her own sometimes to find clues but only because she was the eldest sibling.
Overall, I gave this novel 5/5 stars as it was a good mystery novel. It left you thinking the whole way through as to what the mystery was. You just wanted to know what happened to Salim so you had to keep reading. This novel gripped me from just reading the blurb on the back of the book. If you like a good mystery then this will certainly capture your attention when you read the back of the book. This is also a good book if you live in London and know the different areas of London featured in the novel.
Rating 4/5
