I love reading stories this month that put middle grade characters in close proximity to the dead! It acknowledges that there were real grave robbers through the centuries who not only stole from the dead but trafficked in their body parts, first for sale as saints' relics and later to alchemists and those who conducted the often-illicit study of anatomy.
Spade's a tween Joolie, so named because of his club foot and grave-robbing father's assumption that that's all he'll ever be good for -- digging up the recently deceased. One dark night he digs up Bagman Grute, a rather well to do, freshly dead man who, it turns out, is buried with disappointingly few valuables, while Spade's younger brother acts as lookout.
Spade does find an oddly compelling, if ordinary, grey pebble and pockets it. The dark doesn't scare him, and he doesn't believe in local tales of a monster, the Woegan, wandering the hills and making people disappear.
Now, the old lady who makes him stop and drag her bench to the top of the cemetery's hill in the middle of the night? That frightens him. She could expose him and his brother, so he pretends to be Wyndhail's latest grave digger's apprentice.
She isn't fooled, but she doesn't turn Spade in, either. Hold onto this, because you'll see her again, and this encounter will color all the events to come.
Because that pebble Spade picked up? In Bagman Grute's coffin? It's a lot more than a pebble. And the Woegan is very, very real.
And when Spade and his brother do get caught, as you know they will, during one of their father's harebrained schemes to rob the royal cemetery -- Spade's given an impossible task.
Track down the Woegan's master. Or his 10-year-old brother will languish in the dungeon -- indefinitely.
Enjoy the read!
