This series continues to be so engaging, combining mysteries, magic and other worldliness into an exciting adventure. It has been a while since I read the first and second in the series, so I was delighted to be able to return to Quicksmiths thanks to the kindness of the publishers, Firefly Press and NetGalley. It is a series that continues to deliver and in this installment Kip and friends must travel into the molten ocean deep below the earth's crust to defeat the Grittleshanks once and for all. Filled with all the trademark puzzles of Quicksmiths we meet some new adversaries and make some new friends.
A real heart burst of a read; simply wonderful.

The Ten Riddles of Eartha Quicksmith was a book that I read five years ago after having it recommended to me by a friend. Filled with riddles and puzzles, it was a fantasy adventure that I really enjoyed so when its sequel, The Myriad Mysteries of Eartha Quicksmith, followed two years later I obviously had to read that too. Both books were cracking titles that followed young hero Kip and his friends as they learned about the hidden wonders around them at secret school Quicksmiths and generally went about doing good deeds and saving mankind from danger.

After the excitement of discovering buried treasure on that second outing, five months has passed and Kip is studying the Futurescope that he and his friends uncovered, created 400 years previously by Eartha Quicksmith herself. Heading outside to meet up with best friend Albert, Kip is also joined by Timmi and Leela before going to check on Incognita – the AI android who accompanied them before and who was damaged by enemies the Grittleshanks.

Before long, the team uncover a riddle that has been sent by Eartha and find themselves combining their skills and knowledge to understand what it means, but the puzzle is just the first of many that will set them on a course to try to stop the Grittleshanks’ latest scheme. Finding himself and the others sailing below the Earth’s crust on an incredible ship, Kip learns that not only are his enemies intent on putting a scheme into place that will threaten the entire world but that they are holding his mother, who has been sick for some considerable time, hostage. Can Kip and the others defeat the Grittleshanks once and for all? And if they can, will Kip’s mother finally be reunited with Kip and his father?

As before, the narrative is filled with tricky puzzles that Kip and his friends uncover that lead to all sorts of fantastical events created by Loris Owen’s incredible imagination. Whether it be the strange properties of chemical elements that exist outside standard scientific understanding or some of the creatures that are encountered – both organic and manmade – there are some great ideas that form the backbone of the story here.

When this title was announced, I was really looking forward to reading it to see how Kip’s adventure concluded but having now read it, I have to say that I didn’t enjoy it anywhere near as much as I did Books 1 and 2. In fairness to the author, the long gap between reading Book 2 and this one probably didn’t help but I was hoping that I would be reminded of everything I needed to know as I went along without having to reread it. Quite possibly those details were there and I missed them but at times I struggled to keep up with the narrative, not helped by the length of the chapters, which I felt was too much. Admittedly, each was broken down under subheadings, but as someone who likes to finish each reading session at the end of a chapter, spending over half an hour on most of the chapters was too much for my brain to handle and as a result I really struggled to concentrate for much of the book. This could, of course, be entirely down to me, rather than the story, but for that reason, I would suggest that this is best read shortly after Book 2 and is probably better targeted at those readers in Year 6 upwards who have the stamina for a longer session than I can clearly manage and who will, I’m sure, enjoy this.

My thanks go to both publisher Firefly Press and to NetGalley for my gifted advance read of the book. The Cyber Ciphers of Eartha Quicksmith publishes 28th August.