Friday Barnes: Nothing to Lose

Friday Barnes: Nothing to Lose by R.A. Spratt. Puffin (Penguin Random House), 2026. YA paperback, 272 pages. RRP $16.99. ISBN 9781761349737.

Reviewed by Debra Williams

16-year-old Friday Barnes is living in New York with her best friend, Melanie, and is bereft. When a newspaper picture appears of her kissing Arthur, the prince of Denmark, at the opening of an exhibition, her boyfriend Ian is upset. Friday tries to explain she wasn’t kissing him; it was the other way around, as she carried a tray of drinks. Ian is angry and walks out and to take up a modelling job in L.A.

Friday, unable to deal with the heartbreak, throws herself into the world of chess, an intellectual game that suits her. She challenges players to long games of street chess, and, being Friday, she gets absorbed in them.

However, when Arthur shows up unexpectedly saying he needs a date, Friday is mortified. Arthur wants a companion to appear as his girlfriend to accompany him on Danish official business. Friday refuses flat-out, and that appears to be the end of the matter, until Uncle Bernie, the head of Interpol, orders Friday to accept the date.

A production of Hamlet is being organised, and Arthur’s father, the king of Denmark, has ordered Arthur to make a cameo appearance, a prospect that Arthur is less than impressed with.

Talk has spread on the black market, and there's reason to believe an inside group is planning to steal the royal Danish medallion, The Collar of the Order of the Elephant, which the Danish king has insisted on loaning for the production. Friday is to be the undercover agent on the inside, watching everything, including the people watching the play.

What follows is a cat-and-mouse chase to stop the theft. Ian returns and saves Friday from dramatically trying to escape arrest due to a false accusation that she has issued a death threat to Arthur. 

When Arthur seems to have been poisoned in the ear during opening night, it appears that real poison has been substituted. Other mishaps occur, and eventually, it turns out that Arthur has masterminded the robbery as a fake. He tries to escape with Karin, a former schoolmate of Friday’s, to no avail.

Book number 14 in the Friday Barnes series, this is a clever plot and suitable for a readership of 12+, and possibly even a more mature age group due to the style of language and themes.