Naomi Investigates: The Market Woman's Ledger

She solves people. This time, someone in the market is a killer.

Eleven-year-old Naomi Banda runs a detective agency from a packing crate behind her family's kitchen, with a blue exercise book for a case file and her banana-eating best friend Chimz for backup. Her cases are small — until the morning all of Kasoko wakes to find Mama Tembo, the beloved and feared queen of the market, dead in her chair.

Everyone says the old woman "ate something bad." Everyone is wrong. And the grey ledger that held the whole town's debts, secrets and quiet kindnesses has gone missing.

Warm, funny and quietly heartbreaking, this is the first Naomi Banda mystery — for confident readers aged 10–13 (and the grown-ups reading over their shoulders).

The agency is open.