Nine year old Frankie Appleton likes to count gates.

One day, she hopes to design the perfect gate – a gate to keep the bad things out.

Little does she know that the bad things have already got in.

Thus reads the back blurb on The Weight of Small Things. The art of writing this blurb really needs to be more widely lauded. Here we have the very essence of the book – a small child, possibly a little unusual, possibly a little obsessive, who is clearly in a dangerous situation. We have the pull on the heartstrings for the child and the intrigue of what the ‘bad things’ are. And what will happen?

When we first meet Frankie she is indeed counting gates though swish of windscreen wipers  in a friend’s car. Apart from her readerships of Designing Gates magazine, all seems normal until she gets home and finds a mug with the smell of whisky and wonders whether her mother is ‘entertaining’. But her mother is dead and the police think it is suicide. Frankie thinks it is murder and, from her new home in her Grandmother’s high rise flat, sets out to prove it.

In 1979, Peggy, Frankie’s mother, is a young woman who is determined to escape her past. But meeting Ed at a Bob Dylan concert leads to domesticity and then a death and personal destruction.

This is a first time book by author Julie Lancaster, who manages to ably pull us into the mind of a bright nine year old who’s already not-very-satisfactory life is broken up by an act of violence and her quest to solve a murder, and the disturbed head of a woman whose life falls apart. I felt there were slightly too many narrators, especially as Frankie is by far the most engaging character and the one you want to stay with, but overall an excellent debut.

Mirror Books

£8.99

IBSN 9781913406189