Eye Spy

Eye Spy is the first in a series of exciting stories for middle grade readers about Alex and Donna Macintyre and their detective service, Eye Spy Investigations.

‘A fast-paced, exciting ‘whodunit’. A red ribbon winner.’ The Wishing Shelf Book Awards

“I thoroughly enjoyed this contemporary adventure story.” Jill Murphy, author of The Worst Witch series.

Over the course of ten days, the lives of thirteen-year-old Alex Macintyre and his twin sister Donna will change forever…

When teen detectives Alex and Donna set up Eye Spy Investigations and start to look into the case of the missing lap dog, they soon have an interesting assortment of suspects. There’s the mysterious man in the fur hat; a gang of bikers who hang out at the Starship Café; and Crazy Kath, the bag lady, who may know more than she’s letting on.

While they struggle to make sense of the evidence, they are also trying to help their father sell his latest invention, a robot called Hamish. But their investigations take an unexpected turn when they uncover an unsolved mystery in their own family.

As a major storm hits town, and events start to spiral out of control, Alex must act fast if he is to have any chance of resolving a family crisis, saving his sister from imminent danger, and finding the missing dog.

To read the first chapter of Eye Spy click here.

How Eye Spy came to be written

I love reading novels about Private Investigators, and stories where there is a mystery to be solved, so writing a book about two teenage sleuths was a no-brainer.

I realised very early on that I wanted to set the books in a seaside town. Writers are always told to ‘write what you know’, and we live in Leigh-on-Sea, which lies on the Thames estuary next to its much larger neighbour, Southend-om-Sea. But Holcombe Bay isn’t like Southend. I imagined it as a small town on the South coast where visitors flock in the summer, but which is quiet and sleepy in winter. It’s a combination of all the holiday resorts we took our children to when they were small: Morecombe, Great Yarmouth, Hastings…

So where did the characters come from? It took me a long time to realise that Alex and Donna are versions of a brother and sister that I knew as a child. He was calm, studious and unruffled, while she was impulsive and always getting into trouble. And it’s no secret that the twins’ eccentric inventor father was inspired by my husband Gwyn, who loves to shut himself away in his workshop and invent useful gadgets. However, in fairness to him, I must point out that he’s not nearly as eccentric as Ian Macintyre! The rest of the characters appeared out of nowhere, although Nan Macintyre was perhaps inspired by the rather dour Scottish lady who cooked our school dinners when I was a child.