Secret Circle Mysteries #9 Disappearing Dogs, #10 Spaniards Rock, and #11 Wildcat Well

In Secret Circle Mysteries #9, The Mystery of the Disappearing Dogs, dogs are disappearing all around Toronto.  Two rival gangs, Annex and Spadina, put aside their differences in order to find out who is taking the dogs.

This book was written in order to expose the cruel experiments that were being done on animals in the early 1960s.  There are some graphic descriptions of what was done to dogs and cats under experimentation, and I could have done without reading those descriptions.

Since this book was published in 1963, I was curious as to when regulations about animal testing went into effect.  President Johnson signed the Animal Welfare Act of 1966 into law in the United States, and the Canadian Council on Animal Care was formed in 1968. 

This book doesn't have an obvious single protagonist.  It's a group of children, so the reader doesn't get attached to any of the characters, which lessens the impact of the story.  I found that I didn't really care.  I did not enjoy this book very much.

In Secret Circle Mysteries #10, The Secret of Spaniards Rock, Bob and Sue Channing vacation near Spaniards Rock.  A couple of men who are staying there act suspiciously, and the children soon suspect that they are criminals who might be holding the residents of the lighthouse captive.

This is another story where the mystery is obvious from the beginning.  A large roll of five-dollar bills washes ashore, and the serial numbers are in order.  One of the men claims the roll of bills.  The men do some type of work in a building which has loud machinery.  Gee, what could the men be doing?

I began skimming towards the end, not because the text was uninteresting, but because I knew what the mystery was and how it would be resolved.  I saw no point in reading every detail.

In the final Secret Circle Mystery, The Mystery at the Wildcat Well, Rory must go to live with his father, who works on an isolated oil rig.  Rory overhears a conversation which indicates that a spy works on one of the rigs.  Later, Rory learns that his father's rig is the one with the spy, but his father won't believe him.

Some parts of this book dragged for me, especially the lengthy description of the drilling process.  The description is not as long and tedious as in the first Sandy Steele book, but it's still a bit excessive.  It seems that I'm learning a great detail about drilling for oil as I read various books this year, and I'm learning far more than I want to learn.

I enjoyed this story.