There's something mysterious about the big, old house across the river. So when Archie and his two friends are offered a job tidying the attic, they jump at the chance. But sifting through the mess, they stumble upon something priceless, leaving them with a difficult decision. This exciting story by Chris Powling is illustrated by Martin Ursell.

* 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: An adventure 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. Illustrator: Martin Ursell teaches illustration at Chelsea School of Art. He has illustrated numerous books and has a convincing style in junior 'grossology'. Author: Susan Martineau is a freelance editor and her daughter Alice and son William are just the right age to test the artistic effectiveness of the projects. Chris Powling is the author of more than 30 books for children, ranging from beginner readers to teenagers. A teacher and broadcaster, Chris was editor of the children's book magazine Books For Keeps for seven years.