Hardy Boys Adventures #18 The Disappearance and #19 Dungeons and Detectives

In Hardy Boys Adventures #18, The Disappearance, Frank and Joe attend a comic book convention with Jones and her friend, Harper.  After the convention, the young people enjoy pizza in Harper's apartment.  After the Hardys and Jones leave, Jones realizes that she has Harper's phone instead of her own.  When the boys return to Harper's apartment, they find it ransacked and Harper missing.

I kept confusing the characters as I read this story.  The characters might have been introduced too quickly, which often causes confusion.  Additionally, online chat names are given, which is more information than I needed.

I forgot to write a review of this book early this year, so I cannot remember exactly what I thought of it.  I do recall that I enjoyed it but not as much as other Hardy Boys Adventures books.

In Hardy Boys Adventures #19, Dungeons and Detectives, Sir Robert's Comic Kingdom has become a popular hangout for RPG fans, who especially love playing Sabers and Serpents, which is similar to Dungeons and Dragons.  Sir Robert plans to have a massive Halloween party to unveil the contents of a rare comic book that he owns, but the comic book is stolen!  The boys must find the culprit and locate the comic book.

On page 105, Charm from the Story Thieves series is mentioned.  It's rather odd for an actual name to be mentioned from another series, since names are usually changed or just not mentioned.  In this case, mentioning the name promoted another Simon and Schuster series, so of course they would be okay with it.

Nancy Drew is mentioned on pages 106 and 107.  This is a cross-promotion tied to A Nancy Drew Christmas.

A "missing map" is mentioned several times.

The book is a bit slow for the first 40 to 45 pages, then it gets pretty interesting once the boys arrive at the old castle.  After that point, I feel that the book continues to drag at times.  I was partially not interested and wished that the plot would speed up.  My problem might have been that the focus of this story is on activities that are not of interest to me, like role-playing games. 

Too much of the last part of the story is taken up with a lengthy explanatory session about what happened with the comic book.  The lengthy explanatory session is much like the lengthy sessions from the later titles of the original Grosset and Dunlap Hardy Boys series.  The rest of the story also contains great detail, and quite frankly, it was too much for me.

Interestingly, a review on Amazon highly praises the book for being like the old Hardy Boys books.  That was exactly my problem.  I actually do not particularly care for a large number of the original 58 Hardy Boys books.  After reading that review, I decided that this book is much like those which is part of what turned me off.

If you are a big fan of the original Hardy Boys books and have never read a Hardy Boys Adventures book, then this is probably the one to try.  I found it partially boring, but the people who have reviewed it on Amazon really enjoyed it.  My opinion of Hardy Boys books tends to be the opposite of many Hardy Boys fans, so there you go.  I am not in the target audience, which makes it not surprising that my opinion differs.

While I was not thrilled with this book, I suspect that is a very good book for Hardy Boys fans.