Flash Harriet, together with Gus, her pet tarantula, is back and on the trail of a new crime. Huge footprints have smashed up the local vegetable garden. Is it something to do with Marmaduke Mildew and the Giant Vegetable Competition? Or does the clue lie in the footprints themselves? Find out how our favouite detective solves the mystery.

* Ruby/Band 14 books give increasing opportunities for children to develop their skills of inference and deduction.

* Text type: A humorous story.

* The step-by-step review of the clues that helped Flash Harriet solve the case on pages 46-47 enable children to recap the significant events of the story.

* Curriculum links: Science: Helping plants grow well; Citizenship: People who help us - the local police.

* This book has been quizzed for Accelerated Reader.

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

. 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 48 pages in this book. This book was published 2009 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Karen Wallace is the author of more than 90 books for children. Collins UK has been publishing educational and informative books for almost 200 years. Jonathan was born in 1965, the son of a rig fitter and a primary school teacher. He first developed his skills as a writer and illustrator while studying architecture, illustrating poems and lyrics that he had written. After leaving college, he worked as an architect for several years, before pursuing a career in children's books. In addition to writing books such as Bringing Down the Moon, and Ruby Flew Too, he also paper-engineers pop-up books.