As always, animal imagery abounds in her new novel, The Children of the King (Viking, $24.95 hb, 265 pp, 9780670076130); the pages are full of comparisons to lions, elephants, beetles, parrots, wild dogs, cats, ponies, tigers, and other beasts, as well as metaphorical pleasures (‘Her thumbnail, incompletely chewed, was singing a siren’s song’). Like her previous novel The Midnight Zoo (2010), this is a story that revolves around the powerlessness of children caught up in the violence and upheavals of World War II, although the privileged Lockwood children have an easier time of it than the two little gypsy brothers roaming the blasted countryside of East Europe. That’s Mr Lockwood playing a game with them during the early days of the London blackout: in the second chapter, they and their mother leave the city, along with hundreds of evacuee children, bound for Heron Hall in the north, where their Uncle Peregrine takes them in, along with one of those evacuees, ten-year-old May Bright.

Uncle Peregrine is one of Hartnett’s romantic, Byronic males (his dog is actually named Byron), with a limp that keeps him from war service, and a dead wife and baby throwing a shadow across his past. Tall, lean, his hair a long dark mane, he resembles ‘a wily criminal from an adventure tale’ or a ‘sly magician’. Or perhaps he more closely resembles Richard III, who in 1483 imprisoned his two young nephews in the Tower of London and supposedly murdered them in order to attain the throne. There is, apparently, some documentation to suggest that the boys were moved in 1485 to one of Richard’s properties in the north, and Hartnett plays with this possibility when Cecily and May encounter two brothers hiding in an ancient ruined castle on their uncle’s land. Later, after Peregrine has related the history of the castle and its legendary links with the little princes in the tower, May realises the strange boys might not be runaway evacuees.

As in The Midnight Zoo, Hartnett’s introduction of a supernatural element into an otherwise bleakly realistic historic narrative – fourteen-year-old Jeremy’s experiences during the London Blitz form the climax of the story – enables her to blur the sharp edges of horror. The story concludes with a reassuring glimpse into the future. Its greatest achievement, however, is not the skilful intertwining of past and present, with corresponding layers of interpretation and parallel themes, but the depiction of an impatient young man’s first steps towards adulthood and a self-centred child’s growth towards compassion.

The hardback looks like a storybook from the 1940s, with a cover in dull camouflage colours showing three featureless children stiffly posed on a rock under the bland title. You would already have to be a fan of Sonya Hartnett to reach for it with a sense of excitement or anticipation.

This is not the case with The Tunnels of Tarcoola (Allen & Unwin, $14.99 pb, 222 pp, 9781742376752), by Jennifer Walsh, whose spooky cover promises dark adventures. This shows how deceptive packaging can be, for Hartnett’s is by far the better and more exciting story. This is tough on Walsh, a first-time novelist, if only because there are not many authors in Australia to rival Hartnett. But the banality of the writing, especially the dialogue, dulls anticipation from the first page, which firmly locates the reader in Blytonland: secret tunnels, an abandoned mine, friends David and Andrea and siblings Kitty and Marty, and nasty men out to scare the intrepid young sleuths.

The story begins as they explore one of the beach caves and are caught by a rising tide: ‘“We’ll drown!” gasped Kitty […] “We’re going to die!” wailed Kitty […] “Rats!” shrieked Andrea.’ The boys are calm and sensible. Clichés infect the prose: gardens are immaculate, cars sweep up drives, padlocks are rusty, banisters are rickety, keys scrape in locks, stairs creak, hearts pound, thump, and hammer, and old photographs are conveniently found at the back of drawers. Japanese submarines in Sydney Harbour, World War II, and a Jewish refugee also make their way into the plot.

The author was apparently inspired by the abandoned coalmines that exist under much of the inner-Sydney suburb of Balmain, which should have made for a story worth reading, but the characterisation is two-dimensional and the plotting pedestrian, often relying on unlikely coincidence. Blyton has inspired many children’s writers, including Hartnett, but the best of them transcend the template she established. Incidentally, if recent titles, including this one, are any guide, old people in nursing homes must live in fear of opening their eyes to see some young person clutching a notebook and determined to cheer them up by recording their memories for a school project.

In Red (Allen & Unwin, $15.99 pb, 180 pp, 9781741758535), a thriller set in a post-apocalyptic Sydney, Libby Gleeson shows that genre fiction can be both exciting and well-written. A lone girl, bruised, battered, and covered with mud, regains consciousness in a coastal landscape utterly destroyed by a cyclone. She can’t remember who she is or anything about her past. She is befriended by Peri, a streetwise kid whose own world has been similarly torn apart, but who has learned how to survive amid the chaos. He christens her Red because of her hair, and eventually they locate Jazz, her former schoolfriend. The three try to piece together emerging fragments of Red’s history, but around her neck is their best clue: a memory stick encased in a locket. Plugged into Jazz’s computer, it contains vital evidence compiled by Red’s missing father, which he urges her, via video, to deliver to a Royal Commission into police corruption now entering its final days in Melbourne. ‘Do not take it to the police,’ Dad warns: ‘Trust no one.’

Red insists that she must deliver the memory stick personally, so without a word to anyone – Jazz’s father is a senior policeman – the three steal a credit card and head to Melbourne. In the interests of an exciting plot, some logic is abandoned at this point: Jazz’s unnecessary involvement in the trip guarantees a police hunt for them, while it is never adequately explained why Red doesn’t simply email the evidence directly to the Commission. Our heroine, too, has an extraordinary bladder. Never at any point during the week, from the time she struggles into consciousness, does she feel the need to empty it. In a city all but flattened by cyclone and floods, sanitation is no small concern, and Gleeson rather fudges this aspect of the story. Otherwise, the pacing, the strong characterisation, rising tension, and the depiction of a familiar world turned upside down make for a gripping read.

The inspiration behind Jen Banyard’s amusing Mystery at Riddle Gully (Fremantle Press, $14.95 pb, 196 pp, 9781921888748), in which the girl-reporter-in-training is named Pollo di Nozi, might well be the young sleuth in Alan Bradley’s Flavia de Luce series, which began with The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (2009). It could also be The Shaggy Gully Times (2007), Jackie French and Bruce Whatley’s hilarious parody of a country newspaper. Pollo, whose best friend is a sheep called Shorn Connery – until she meets Will, the troubled new boy in town – wants to win a junior cadetship, in the pursuit of which she has been producing her own weekly news sheet featuring embarrassing revelations about the unpopular mayor. A fan of vampire fiction, Pollo is hot on the trail of a suspicious foreigner who combs the forest at night and seems to have an affinity with bats, but after farcical adventures involving Will, graffiti, a missing sheep, and holy water, Pollo stumbles on a bigger story that catapults her from tabloid to broadsheet fame. Banyard writes with insight and humour. Her one mistake, which Blyton would never have made, is to unnecessarily privilege the parental viewpoint.