Hardy Boys Undercover Brothers #19 Foul Play, #20 Feeding Frenzy, and #21 Comic Con Artist

In Hardy Boys Undercover Brothers #19 Foul Play, Frank and Joe go undercover as members of Pinnacle College's football team. Pinnacle is to play for the national championship, and it is believed that some of the players are going to throw the game.

On page 37, we learn that Joe played football in school.  In Undercover Brothers #5, Frank and Joe did not play football because Fenton wouldn't let them.

I expected this book to be very boring, since it would be the typical football and gambling conspiracy  story.  It turned out much more interesting than I expected.

Joe plays in the championship game.  The problem is that he is not a student at Pinnacle. Colleges can't have random students from elsewhere playing football, especially in a national championship game.  Nothing is ever mentioned in the book about this being a problem.

This story reads a lot like a Hardy Boys Digest book, so this might have been a Digest book that was revised for this series.

This is an excellent book.

In Hardy Boys Undercover Brothers #20, Feeding Frenzy, a death has occurred in a qualifying round for Football Frank's Super Bowl hot dog eating contest.  Frank and Joe enter the contest as contestants as they investigate the death.

On page 8, we learn Chet is not athletic, that he is a "couch potato."  I guess he has already lost the "two hundred pounds of solid muscle, yo" that he had built up in Murder at the Mall.  What a shame.

The characters are not introduced well in this story, and I didn't care about any of them.  The story is mostly not very interesting until around page 100.

The story gives too much information about hot dog eating contests, like graphic descriptions about how to eat the hot dogs and buns quickly.  There is a medical emergency later in the book that also involves some graphic information I won't repeat.  Ugh.  Boys probably enjoy this information, but I don't.

This book is overall good, except for the gross parts.

In Hardy Boys Undercover Brothers #21, Comic Con Artist, Frank and Joe investigate forgeries of valuable comic book art.

One character makes really nasty statements about how comic books are childish.  I don't like seeing this kind of very negative statement about comic books, since it feeds the stigma against comic books.

On page 101, Frank and Joe interview a professor who has lots of comic book memorabilia in his office.  Joe immediately picks up a statue, which I thought was quite rude.  When the professor grabs the statue from Joe immediately, Joe thinks to himself about how this is "the kind of guy who [doesn't] want you touching his collection." Can you blame him?

I overall enjoyed this book, but I lost interest towards the end.