Skip to content
Story SeedsStory Seeds

12 January 2026

Shifty McGifty and Slippery Sam: The Cat Burglar

Cover of Shifty McGifty and Slippery Sam: The Cat Burglar by Tracey Corderoy, illustrated by Steven Lenton.

Shifty McGifty and Slippery Sam is a series we have grown fond of. The Cat Burglar is one of the later books in it.

The conceit of the series is that Shifty and Sam are reformed dog burglars who now run a bakery. They bake cakes. They solve mysteries. That framing gives Tracey Corderoy something to hang each book on without repeating herself, and it gives Steven Lenton a reason to draw a floppy-eared dog in a bakery apron, which he does extraordinarily well.

The Cat Burglar is the one where cakes are going missing from the bakery. It has a small mystery with a proper resolution. More plot than most picture books manage, and none of it fudged.

The reason we donate the series and not just the odd title is that the rhymes scan and the plots hold together across multiple books. Most rhyming picture books get by with close-enough rhymes and a loose metre, and a parent reading one aloud feels the gaps. Corderoy and Lenton do not have those gaps. You can read them at the end of a long day without apologising to the child.

The original Shifty McGifty and Slippery Sam was shortlisted for the Roald Dahl Funny Prize. The series has enough titles that if a child likes one, the bookshop has a pile of others ready.