Sunday, April 20, 2014

Nancy Drew #167 Mystery by Moonlight, #168 Bike Tour Mystery, and #169 Mistletoe Mystery

In Nancy Drew #167, Mystery by Moonlight, Nancy and Ned join Bess and George as they house sit at a lakeside cottage in Pennsylvania for friends who are away on vacation.  Bess is convinced that the cottage is haunted.  The young people hear screams at night, and see prowlers in the area.  Mysterious sounds come from above the ceiling during the night, but the cottage has no attic.

This book has several good suspects.  I correctly guessed one of them very early in the book, because it was so painfully obvious. 

This is a very good book, and I thoroughly enjoyed it from start to finish.


In Nancy Drew #168, The Bike Tour Mystery, Nancy, Bess, and George participate in a bike tour in Ireland.  Someone seems to be trying to hurt two girls from Australia, and Nancy tries to investigate while the girls rebuff her.

On page 83, George tells Nancy that she wrote down a license plate number and that she put the paper in her shoe because she doesn't have any pockets.  But then she must have used a pen or pencil to write the number down.  Where does she keep that?  On a chain around her neck?

Like all of the Nancy Drew Digest books, this book is written in the past tense.  Strangely, this book uses "today" and "tonight" and not as part of a spoken conversation.

From page 110:
Today's route lay along the wide lake called Lough Corrib.  Terry had dropped off lunch boxes at a grassy area picnic area on the seashore.
It doesn't sound right to me.  I feel that it should begin with "That day's route lay..."

I love the setting.  Ireland is described so vividly and in a way that is very interesting to the reader.  A tiny bit of history is thrown in, enough to be interesting, but not so much as to be boring.

This book is outstanding.

In Nancy Drew #169, The Mistletoe Mystery, Bess works for a company that is decorating Albemarle's department store for Christmas.  Merchandise is mysteriously disappearing from Albemarle's, and Bess's friend, Ali Marie, is fired.  Nancy gets herself hired by the decorating company so that she can work undercover at the store while George finds ways to hang out in the store all day long.

Bess has been skilled with computers since #144, The E-Mail Mystery.  On page 64, Bess has reached a new level.  We learn that Bess is "a skilled computer hacker."  Now she can hack into computers?  Wow!

This is a wonderful, suspenseful book.  The story is somewhat similar to the second Connie Blair book and one Nancy Drew Digest book, #84, The Joker's Revenge.  Fortunately, the mystery is resolved in a different fashion.  For a while, I thought that the resolution would be similar, because suspicion was cast on a certain person for no reason.  I was happy to see that this mystery is indeed different from the other two books.

This book is very good.

1 comment:

M. LeRoy said...

I'm not really surprised Bess is interested in computers- she does seem like the one who would be up-to-date on all that stuff because she can do her favorite hobbies on there. Although, the hacking is just odd, that seems like a George thing.