Nancy Drew Diaries, No. 18 - The Stolen Show

When a character has been around for 90 years (wow! that's hard to believe, seeing it in writing like that!), I can imagine it becomes difficult to come up with new stories to tell.  In the beginning, Nancy Drew solved mysteries involving lost wills, missing relatives, swindlers, haunted houses, and the like.  Somewhere along the line, however, the writers (more so after Simon & Schuster took over ownership of the property) seemed to fall back on one particular type of mystery: sabotage.  With the now defunct Girl Detective series and the current Diaries series, sabotage seems to be the only kind of story that the writers know how to tell.  We may get an occasional surprise story once in a while, but for the most part, you can pretty much count on a Nancy Drew mystery involving sabotage.

So, when I picked up The Stolen Show and started to read it, I sighed when it became apparent that this mystery was centered around someone sabotaging the contestants at a dog show.  A drugged dog, gum stuck in the hair of a dog, and the threat of more attacks has Nancy searching for a dog owner who will do just about anything to guarantee his or her dog wins the biggest dog show of the year!  The only thing is - Nancy (and the reader!) are in for a real surprise when she stumbles (literally!) upon an entirely different mystery - one that makes the doggie sabotage seem like kibbles and bits.

Yes, that's right - the big mystery in The Stolen Show isn't about the dogs at all.  Surprise! If you don't want any spoilers, then I suggest you stop reading this review right now, go read the book, and then come back.  Go ahead.  I'll wait....

Okay, I waited long enough!  You see, Nancy goes chasing after one of the suspects, thinking she is hot on the trail of solving the sabotage mystery, only to discover that her suspect is actually an officer of the law - Interpol, to be exact.  You see, the dog show circuit is being used by some criminal masterminds to smuggle rare and stolen jewels across borders. The international police have been trying to catch these crooks for some time, and they even have their own agent who infiltrated the dog shows in order to sniff out the culprit (see what I did there?).  But, to no avail.  The crooks keep evading them at every turn.

Well, it's a good thing they ran into Nancy Drew, because faithful fans of the teenage sleuth know that there's no mystery she can't solve!

The ghostwriter of this particular book manages to tell a pretty good mystery, and there is some great suspense with the kidnapping of Bess, a chase in a blinding snowstorm, and the ultimate showdown between Nancy and the jewel smuggler.  The camaraderie among the girls reads natural, and Bess and George's willingness to step up and help Nancy in any way possible doesn't feel overdone or forced.  I was a bit disappointed, however, that Nancy does not really hunt down or follow-up on clues to eventually solve the mystery; rather, it seems one event after another happens, until Nancy suddenly connects the dots and in an Agatha Christie-style reveal (all the suspects gathered in one room as Nancy rattles off the various things that led her to uncovering the culprit's identity, with a couple of misleads along the way), she unmasks the jewel thief.  I miss the days of Nancy finding one clue, that leads to another, and then she stumbles across another, and then begins to piece them all together to solve the mystery.  These days, it seems Nancy is pretty much "given" the solution, rather than working hard to find it.   Perhaps that is the problem with all the technology we have these days - it makes solving mysteries way too easy!

In any event, that one drawback did not at all ruin my enjoyment of the book.  This is definitely one of the better Nancy Drew Diaries, and if this is the direction that they are going with the series, then I hope they stick with it!

RATING:  8 plates of poutine out of 10 for making Nancy Drew mysteries enjoyable to read again!