Ross has been saving for a football top of his favourite team for ages, but doesn't think he'll ever afford it. When he sees one pinned to a tree, commemorating the death of a young boy, he can't resist taking it - but Ross gets more than he bargains for, and finds having the shirt comes at a dreadful price ...

* Pearl/Band 18 books offer fluent readers a complex, substantial text with challenging themes to facilitate sustained comprehension, bridging the gap between a reading programme and longer chapter books.

* Text type: A mystery story.

* Curriculum links: Citizenship: Choices.

* This book has been quizzed for Accelerated Reader.

This book features in the following series: Collins Big Cat, Pearl Series .

This book is aimed at children in primary school. This book is part of a reading scheme, meaning that it is a book aimed at children who are learning to read. This reading scheme has multiple levels. This reading book uses the phonics method. This approach concentrates on teaching children how to map between sounds and spellings, allowing them to decode written words into their constituent sounds. Phonics skill thus involves being able to split the written word 'cat' into the phonemes /k/, /a/, /t/, and to map from letter 'c' to phoneme /k/, from letter 'a' to phoneme /ae/ and from letter 't' to phoneme /t/. Decoding skill is useful when reading unfamiliar words which use regular spelling sequences.

There are 80 pages in this book. This book was published 2012 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Collins UK has been publishing educational and informative books for almost 200 years. Cathy MacPhail has won numerous awards, including the Royal Mail Award for Grass, and Out of the Depths has recently been shortlisted for the Scottish Book Award. Cathy's work is enormously popular with young teenagers, her trademarks being pacy and topical storylines. Cathy lives in Greenock, Scotland.