The London Eye Mystery

"I admire that book, and I admire Ted, very, very much. The London Eye Mystery is the story of Ted, a boy who has a very unusual brain. He thinks in a different way to the other members of his family and to all his friends. Sign up here for our newsletter featuring the best children’s and young adult books, as recommended by authors, teachers, librarians and, of course, kids. His cousin Salim and his aunt Gloria come to visit the Sparks in London, and they send Salim on the London Eye on his own. Salim gets into one of the London Eye’s pods, the pod goes up and round, but when it comes back down again, Salim doesn’t get off again. It seems like he’s vanished into thin air. Ted and his sister Kat must logically work through all the possibilities to work out what happened to Salim before it’s too late. The book was written in 2007, and it still stands up to a reading 11 years later. Siobhan Dowd was a genius. All of her books are extremely different in the way they’re written and what they’re thinking about, but each one of them is perfect, down to the sentence level. If you read The London Eye Mystery again and again—and I have—you’ll start seeing that there literally isn’t one word out of place. Every single sentence makes sense—even casual things that people will say are important. If you look at them carefully, you can use them to solve the case, and I just think that’s incredible. Yes. And that’s the other reason why I’ve chosen Ted—I know him incredibly well. Siobhan was really sick when she wrote the The London Eye Mystery , and she died only a couple of weeks after it was first published, which is just incredibly sad. She left behind the title of the second book in the series, The Guggenheim Mystery . Her estate came to me about four years ago now, asking if I’d be interested in carrying on Ted’s story and writing the story to go with the title that she’d already come up with. That’s how I came to write The Guggenheim Mystery for Siobhan. Because I loved Ted so much, I had to say yes. But then it was a long process of reading and reading and re-reading that book to get into the world Siobhan had created. I never got bored of The London Eye Mystery— every time I read it, I liked Siobhan more as a person as well as a writer. I have a special place in my heart for Ted Spark."