After their recent success in unravelling enigmatic Oriental secrets in The Chinese Puzzle, Andrea and Arthur move on to botanical skullduggery in the second in a new mystery series by Quebec writer Chrystine Brouillet. Andrea, 12, and still no fan of broccoli, is again narrator and dedicated sleuth. Her friend, the hyper-relaxed Arthur, supplies technical support and reality checks. Endearingly, both continue to find the real world much more fascinating than any virtual one. Andrea’s interest in orchids is economic: she wants to grow something valuable to earn money for her father’s birthday gift. The suspicious goings-on that she and Arthur uncover in the orchid world, however, seem to be motivated more by glory than cash. The young sleuths become deeply embroiled in a coterie of orchid zealots with names like Trevor, Godfrey, and Professor Cavendish and past lives that sound like they once intersected with Indiana Jones. Detection proceeds at a dizzying clip, complicated by disguises, double disguises, Black Pearl orchids, vanilla, and red herrings.

Lively, zany, and slight, No Orchids for Andrea! has a telegraphic breathlessness augmented abundantly with exclamation marks. Nothing here is quite what it seems: good guys turn out to be bad and bad ones good. One of the good guys, Arthur’s chess partner, is a recidivist thief whose defence is that he’s doing it for his girlfriend, Nancy, seriously ill with cancer. This tends to blur the story’s moral lines in a slightly unsettling way and brings in a jarring note of real-world problems. But these characters have interesting possibilities, and Brouillet may be keeping them up her sleeve for a sequel. There are a few loose ends – like Andrea’s non-resident dad’s birthday, for example, never given a second thought after the first page. But this throwaway, flyaway style is part of the book’s charm. So are Gagnon’s witty illustrations (Andrea with a frizzy mop of hair, Arthur in backwards baseball cap), perfectly matched with the book’s tongue-in-chic.