The List of Suspicious Things

Twelve-year-old Miv enlists her best friend Sharon to help her catch the Yorkshire Ripper. She’ll do anything to ensure she doesn’t have to move away and leave Sharon behind. But as the preteens investigate their list of suspicious people and places, they unknowingly reveal their community’s adult problems—things they’re too young to understand. They suspect missing wives and black eyes for all the wrong reasons, yet they become a thread that draws their neighborhood together even as the serial killer strikes again. Froggatt lends her Yorkshire accent to precocious Miv for most of the audiobook’s length, and several other narrators take chapters from adults’ viewpoints to explore the prejudices, cruelties, and blind eyes Miv’s actions threaten to expose. The cast adds real depth to the community, ensuring readers are invested in more than just Miv’s problems. While the shape of the story is similar to Alan Bradley’s Flavia de Luce series, with its young protagonist and air of sadness, Miv’s investigation diverges from Flavia’s humor and heads toward moving literary fiction.