Hardy Boys Adventures #21 A Treacherous Tide

I never reviewed Hardy Boys Adventures #20, Return to Black Bear Mountain.  The book bored me, and it wasn't worth trying to write up any kind of summary.  I guessed the culprits very early in the books, because it was that obvious.  I'm not sure how early I guessed, but it had to have been in the first two to three chapters.  The entire book bored me, and I never cared.  I recall skimming some of the book.

In Hardy Boys Adventures #21, A Treacherous Tide, Frank and Joe have volunteered to work on a research vessel in the Florida Keys.  Dr. E. Ella Edwards studies sharks, and the boys are eager to work with her.  Their plans take a sudden turn when Dr. Edwards disappears.  She was on her surfboard, which washes ashore damaged by a shark's bite.  The plot thickens when the boys learn that Dr. Edwards was to be the deciding vote on whether a resort can be built on Lookout Key.

Mayor Boothby is an interesting politician.  He is described as follows on page 101.

I was starting to suspect that Boothby was on the level with us about being a pawn in the blackmailer's schemes.  One thing I'd noticed about Mayor Boothby:  he wasn't so much a convincing liar as an enthusiastic one.  Some people are so great at deception, you never notice anything amiss.  Boothby wasn't one of them.  He sold his lies with bombastic stories and a knack for reading a crowd and knowing what they wanted to hear.  It's a lot easier for people to believe a lie if it confirms something they're already worried about—like sharks making them unsafe.  The guy was a showman.  Subtle wasn't his style.

That made me laugh.

This is a very good book that has humor and is paced well.  Humor is very important and tends to be done right in the new Hardy Boys and Tom Swift books.  It is in the Nancy Drew Diaries series that Nancy is used as the butt of a joke to order to create humor.  The way the humor is done in a story makes all the difference.

This is a very good book.