Brooke Parkin is facing one of her worst fears – not just school in general, but starting a new school in the run up to Christmas. Thankfully, the school has a positive Learning Support department, and the other children in the Neurokind Club, along with an understanding form tutor, and she starts to believe that she has finally found a place where she can fit in.

And then the Headteacher is poisoned by a mince pie with an “E” stuck to the top.

As the excitement builds to the annual Christmas Cup, a competition between the six local schools, the last thing the school wants is a murder. Well, in sort of good news, it’s not murder, but murders. Even worse, the second victim is the Maths teacher! It’s up to Brooke and the rest of the Neurokind club to unmask the murderer…

Right. Going to have to restrain myself and give it a fair go, but as I just said, they killed a Maths teacher, which, to me, is all but unforgiveable. Deep breaths, Puzzle Doctor, deep breaths…

In case the blurb isn’t clear, this is a children’s book – Amazon says 8 years and up, but I’d tag it as perhaps a little older than that. But I don’t teach eight year olds, so I could be wrong. What it does mean is that there are certain things that I should probably not be concerned about. We’ll come to those in a bit.

First of all, this book is blurbed as giving an authentic representation of neurodivergency. Brooke in particular, based on the author’s own experiences, absolutely shines. Her setbacks and triumphs form the highlight of the book, and her fellow students, especially Robyn come across well too. It makes a point that every neurodivergent person is different and obviously this does a very good job of putting these children on pedestals and celebrating their strengths, without whitewashing their difficulties. The cynically minded might point out that all of the students seem very aware of their differences – from my experience, this isn’t always the case at all – but as I said, this is designed to celebrate and inspire.

One has to turn a blind eye to the extremely weird set-up of the school – all the neurodivergent students seem to be in the same year group and the idea of the interschool Christmas challenge is nothing like anything I’ve seen before in my twenty-five years plus of teaching. But there is one thing that I can’t turn a blind eye to.

The puzzle set-up – as with Alexandra Benedict’s adult books, there are little games to play for the reader – might imply a fair-play mystery with a puzzle to solve too, but part of the mystery is a memory test and the rest a guessing game. It’s not quite the “I saw you in this photograph” clue that a reader can’t possibly interpret, but it’s basically the same thing. The hidden message in the mince pies is pretty good though.

So all in all, an excellent celebration of neurodiversity, but even as a young reader, I think I’d have been disappointed by the mystery element.