Bea Pocket and the Dog Who Wasn't Lost

There is a dog outside the diner every morning at eight o'clock.

It has a collar. It has a name tag. It is extremely well fed.

And every single person in Saltmarch thinks it belongs to somebody else.

Bea Pocket has walked past that dog four hundred times without once wondering whose it was - because a dog with a collar is a dog that belongs to somebody, and a dog that belongs to somebody is not a problem.

Then Wilf asks her a question that takes nine days to recover from: who actually read the tag?

Nobody has. Not one person in the whole town. And when Bea finally cleans the worn brass under the laundromat light, two more words come up out of it - and they are not the dog's name at all.

They are an address.

And then Bea does something she has never done before. She gets it completely right.

She stands up in the diner in front of everybody and tells them exactly what she has found, and every word of it is true, and she has checked all of it three times.

The room says oh. And goes back to its breakfast.

Three days later the dog is still on the pavement at eight o'clock, and Wilf asks the question that the rest of this book is made of:

"So who went?"

Nobody went. Including Bea.

Bea Pocket and the Dog Who Wasn't Lost is a funny, warm-hearted mystery for readers aged 7-10 about the strangest thing people do: eleven kind people each doing one kind thing, and the sum of it adding up to nobody at all.

Thirty-four short chapters with an illustration in every one. Includes two pages at the back on the real science of why nobody goes - and the one sentence that beats it.

Book three of The Pocket Detective. Each one stands alone.