Here are two recent additions to Maverick Publishing’s junior fiction list

The Stolen Spear
Saviour Pirotta, illustrated by Davide Ortu
Maverick Publishing

The first in a new series set in the Late Neolithic period, on an island in the Orkneys, this is exciting historical fiction for primary age readers.

The focus is on the narrator, young Wolf, and his endeavours to discover who is really responsible for the disappearance of the sacred spear that is stolen from a burial mound during the midsummer celebrations.

And after a journey that takes him far from his village and community, from one island to another, discover the thief he does with the help of his trusty dog Shadow and friends he makes along the way.

By the time he reaches home once more, not only has Wolf secured the spear, but he’s also discovered his path in life. Tough and strong he may not be, but he’s destined to become a very special person in his community,

With illustrations by Davide Ortu adding to the atmosphere, there’s trickery, plenty of thrills, friendship, hope and determination aplenty in this twisting, turning Stone-Age tale for which the author draws on real historic links and places about which he talks in a note at the end of the book.

Buttercup Sunshine and the House on Hangman’s Hill
Colin Mulhern
Maverick Publishing

Colin Mulhern tells a tale that blends together comic horror and the classic story of Frankenstein that sees the return of Buttercup Sunshine.

As the story begins there’s been a zombie invasion of Buttercup’s locality (even her gran has been zombified) and she’s on her way to inform the town’s powers that be, when she meets a postman who begs her instead to go first to Hangman’s Hill to deliver a package to a house that has suddenly appeared as if from nowhere.

What follows is a bizarre encounter with the extremely weird and seemingly totally mad scientist calling himself Dr Frankenstein and what’s more he has a monster and a storeroom full of jars containing human brains.

Buttercup is desperate to find a cure for the zombies but as she discovers, the doc. has other plans of the world destroying kind. So when he sends her to fetch one of those brains – a very particular one – from the store, she knows she has to do something or she might even find herself becoming part of his very unearthly experiment.

I’ll say no more other that the words ‘bunny rabbit’ and the hope that she succeeds.

Totally crazy but enormous fun and ‘a bit carroty’ in its final moments.