The Three Investigators #33 Purple Pirate and #34 Wandering Cave Man

In the Three Investigators #33, The Mystery of the Purple Pirate, an advertisement offers to pay anybody who can tell Major Karnes about local pirates.  The Three Investigators respond to the ad and are dismayed when Karnes barely listens to what they have to say, and even worse, he doesn't pay them!  Jupiter is convinced that Karnes is up to something, so the boys eavesdrop.  Soon they learn that Karnes is only interested in the Purple Pirate Lair and the man who runs the attraction.

The plot of this book is a bit convoluted.  While I overall enjoyed this book, I could have done without the excessively long description of the pirate attraction.  It went on and on!  The book also should have had slightly fewer villains.

This book is good but borderline mediocre.  It is also rather confusing.

In the Three Investigators #34, The Mystery of the Wandering Cave Man, bones of a hominid are found in a cave.  Before the bones can be properly recovered, the owner of the land confiscates them and launches a tourist attraction!  Later, the bones are stolen!

Early in the story, I was quite bored while the boys watch an excruciatingly long television interview with two men bickering about the bones.  They discuss the bones for what seems like an eternity.  I was so bored! 

Not until page 71 did I feel like perhaps the story was finally getting started. 

On page 77, the boys question why the bones would have been stolen because the bones "aren't valuable in themselves, like gold or jewelry."   The bones are said to be at least 10,000 years old and maybe older.  Why wouldn't somebody steal them?

The final chapter of the book is titled "Mr. Sebastian Is Impressed."  This just proves that Mr. Sebastian is an idiot.  I wasn't impressed!  This book is so boring!  I skimmed so many parts of the book.  I skimmed the last chapter.  I couldn't take anymore of it.

This book is my least favorite of the first 34 books in the Three Investigators series.  I like it less than #30, 31, and 33, and I didn't like those very much.  Reading this book was almost painful at moments.