Kudos to Vancouver writer and editor Melanie Jackson for her novel The Spy in the Alley, the first of a series featuring a saucy 11-year-old detective/songbird named Dinah Galloway. With writing as delicious as the fresh tomatoes Dinah loves to munch, Jackson weaves a lively mystery around a bucktoothed voyeur, a dim-witted thief, a box-headed bodyguard, an anti-smoking group, a talent agency, and Dinah’s teenage sister’s two suitors. The book is often hilarious, but touches on serious themes such as coping with grief.

Dinah’s opening section, “The First Word (I always like to have it),” explains that she is writing this story on her computer, an interesting narrative device that would have been more successful if it had been either developed fully, with more italicized sections, or pared down to just the opening and closing. As it is, when the italicized sections reappear at the end, the reader is jarringly reminded that Dinah is writing down the story.

A few things are a stretch to believe: that Dinah composes 32 well-written pages in the time it takes her sister to comb her hair for a date; and that the operation’s “mastermind” appears holding the very can of paint that proves his guilt, when realistically he would have discarded it. Also, this paint is referred to throughout the book as “spray paint” but conveniently becomes pourable paint for the sake of a funny “pinkwashing” scene that follows. I doubt, however, that these occasional glitches will stop young readers from adoring Dinah and gobbling up this entertaining new mystery series.