Changes

You might not be surprised to read of a private eye that is follically challenged, but it becomes more interesting when the hair that is at the centre of the problem is a missing lock of pop star's tresses, bought from eBay. It becomes even more interesting when the private eye is a twelve year old, calling himself a detective to the scorn of all his fellow school-goers, and treasuring two hundred dollars of tat he achieved by passing an online detective course.

Fletcher then has to retrieve his property - even though the only possible culprit is one of the Sharkey sons, from the neighbourhood's one-family crime wave no less. He also has to continue to suffer the slings and arrows of the other kids at school, from the pink-obsessed girls, to the snotty kids who look up to him (the only ones that can), and the constant barracking that Moon receives from everyone at school - for that is what they do.

It seems churlish to expect the whole Philip Marlowe before his voice has broken shtick to be maintained - I guess it would be an in-joke for us adults that would soon pall - and indeed the writing remains constantly entertaining throughout in other ways. Half Moon, is surely too good an invention to be given just the one novel. ''You set fire to May's garden. This is a dry month; that could have spread'' he says to one local lad, equally dryly. But funniness is not the only fun feature in the book - there is a strong plot, as I say, that might not have dropped my jaw in surprise but was very compelling.

Perhaps as a personal rating four and a half stars is more realistic - I sought more pastiche noir narrative, and the Irish setting could have been used even more, but that again might have turned off the young teenage reader, for whom five stars is surely the only logical response.

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