Tamar by Mal Peet

AZ: "When Tamar's grandfather, an intensely private man, falls from a balcony to his death, he leaves behind a box with Tamar's name on it. For a long time Tamar refuses even to think about it...until one hot June day she opens it to reveal a series of clues and hidden messages from her grandfather. She and her cousin Johannes follow the clues and discover that her name also belonged to someone else over half a century before; someone involved in the terrifying world of resistance fighters in Nazi-occupied Holland during the Second World War. As she pieces together the mystery her grandfather left behind, another Tamar's story is unravelled; a story of passionate love, jealousy and tragedy played out amongst the daily fear and horror of war"

Seem to be drawn to war stories at the moment, this one shifting between the Resistance and SOE operations in the occupied Netherlands and the SOE operatives' grandchild Tamar. I understood the switching between the presnt and past as a technique to engage current teenagers but felt the SOE story was powerful enough to stand alone. Good twist I just did not see coming.

The Penalty by Mal Peet

AZ: "As the city of San Juan pulses to summer's sluggish beat, its teenage football prodigy El Brujito, the Little Magician, vanishes without trace. Paul Faustino, South America's top sports journalist, is reluctantly drawn into the mystery. As a story of corruption and murder unfolds, he is forced to confront a bitter history of slavery, and the power of the occult."

Odd, about football and the occult, found it too foreign to take to