The Mystery at Lilac Inn

Happy Drews-day, it's time for a look at The Mystery at Lilac Inn!

The one on the left is the OT, which is a blue tweed book with dust jacket because they didn't publish the OT with a picture cover (I just looked and I have five dust jacket books, not counting the Applewood editions).  The scene is from near the end of the book when Nancy breaks into a house to spy on the bad guys.

The one on the right is my childhood copy of the RT.  A mysterious ghostly figure has appeared at Lilac Inn, so Nancy dresses up as the ghost to confront her--Nancy is actually the brunette in the corner (she was wearing a wig).  They used tiny flashlights in their sleeves to achieve the ghostly effect.

I like both covers but I think the Scooby-Doo feel of the RT cover puts it over the top as my favorite from this pair.  So let's take a look at the OT:

Case file:
We begin with Nancy driving to Lilac Inn to have lunch; she happens to meet former schoolmate Emily Crandall, so they have lunch together.  Emily has just found out that she'll get an inheritance from her grandmother on her upcoming 18th birthday:  the famous Crandall jewel collection, which is mostly diamonds and worth at least $40,000 (in 1930s money).

When Nancy gets home, we find out that Hannah Gruen is leaving them (!!!) to care for her ill sister, so now Nancy is in charge of finding a new housekeeper for the Drews before a very important judge comes to stay with them.  Nancy interviews several housekeepers before meeting Mary Mason, whom she decides to hire despite getting a bad vibe off of her because Mary has excellent references.  However, when Mary finds out that she'd be working for famous attorney Carson Drew, she turns down the job and leaves.  Nancy finally employs the elderly Mrs. Sadie Carter.

Nancy goes to visit Emily, who tells her that she's engaged to Dick Farnham and plans to sell some of the Crandall jewels to help him get a business off the ground so they can support themselves when they get married.  Emily's guardian, Mrs. Jane Willoughby, goes to the bank with her friend Clara Potter to retrieve the diamonds; they stop at Lilac Inn to eat on the way back, but they act totally suspicious because they have a fortune with them.  There's a car crash just outside the inn, and when everyone rushes to look someone steals Mrs. Willoughby's handbag with the diamonds in it and she immediately has the vapors.  She insists that everyone at the inn be searched, but they don't find the jewels.  Mrs. Willoughby consults with Carson since the police suspect her of engineering the theft herself, and Emily asks Nancy to take the case.

Nancy interviews Mrs. Potter, who gets a bit uncooperative with Nancy's questions; then she goes to Lilac Inn to interview the manager and check out the scene of the crime.  She also visits the other patrons of the inn (no explanation as to how she knows who was there) but doesn't get any further information.  Helen Corning comes to visit Nancy while she's stumped, so she insists that Nancy accompany her on a dress shopping expedition as a distraction.  While at the high-end boutique, they see Mary Mason who seems to have suddenly come into a lot of money as she is wearing expensive clothes; she had been shabbily dressed when Nancy interviewed her for the housekeeping job.  Nancy decides to check on Mary's references, and discovers from her previous employer Mrs. Stonewell that Mary had forged the recommendation and lied about how long she worked for Mrs. Stonewell.  Nancy learns that Mary has a brother in Dockville; she drives there and finds evidence that Mary has been spending quite a lot of money lately despite living in a slum.

While out in town to check out the River Heights pawnbrokers for the jewels, Nancy notices a man with a hook nose and flashy clothes who drops an envelope with Mason's name and address on it, so she follows him.  They end up on a train to Winchester, 30 miles away, but she loses him in a neighborhood with a bunch of pawnshops.  Back at home, Nancy finds out from Carson that the police plan to arrest Mrs. Willoughby for stealing the jewels.  Nancy decides to go talk to Mary Mason again, so she drives to Dockville and sees Mary with two men in a motorboat.  They go into the house, so Nancy opens a window and sneaks inside to spy on the trio, who discuss the jewel theft and argue about how they're splitting the proceeds.  Mary Mason had gone to Lilac Inn the day of the theft to apply for a job, but she saw Mrs. Willoughby acting suspicious with her giant handbag and took advantage of the car crash distraction to snatch the purse without ever even going inside, so no one knew she'd been there.  Hook Nose (real name:  Tom Tozzle, which is pretty fantastic) had begun pawning the diamonds in Winchester, the third person is Mary's brother Bud.

The trio of crooks catch Nancy spying on them, so they tie her up, gag her, and drag her onto the motorboat in the middle of a storm so they can skip town.  Mary villain monologues to Nancy about the jewel theft until the boat crashes into another one on the river and starts to sink (hey look, another boating accident!); the crooks leave Nancy tied up to drown, but she's able to shout for help and a lot of convenient bystanders keep Mary and the two men from escaping.  Mary accuses Nancy of being the thief and dares her to produce the jewels she claims that Mary and the men stole; Nancy goes on the boat which was prevented from sinking and finds the diamonds hidden in a clock.  Nancy returns the jewels to Emily and she and Mrs. Willoughby throw a big party in Nancy's honor at Lilac Inn.  Emily gives Nancy a beautiful bracelet set with precious stones and asks Nancy to be her maid of honor.

Notes:
When I read that Hannah was leaving the Drews, I think I actually yelled WHAT?! out loud and then Hannah isn't mentioned for the remainder of the book.  The HECK.  Obviously she doesn't stay gone, but she's not mentioned again until #6, The Secret of Red Gate Farm.  Apparently Nancy tried out many other servants before SHE hired Hannah?!  I'm used to Hannah having been with the family since Mrs. Drew died when Nancy was 3 so that was jarring to read.  I thought the subplot about Nancy having to find a new housekeeper was a bit tiresome; the book goes into quite a bit of detail about several unsatisfactory housekeepers interviewed by Nancy before she meets Mary Mason.  

Once again,  Helen appears in this book but only for a short time; she gets a lot more to do in the RT, the same as what happened with The Hidden Staircase.  While on the shopping trip, Helen decides on a pale blue chiffon party dress, which is what Nancy bought in The Secret of the Old Clock.

This book is like The Bungalow Mystery in that it involves an inheritance of jewels and the attempted theft thereof.  Lots of people have expensive jewel collections in the Drew-niverse.  Guess that was less risky than having money in the bank after the stock market crash in 1929?  Also, the jewels are found behind a clock face on the boat, which calls back the end of The Secret of the Old Clock.

Nancy's Knockout Tally, OT Edition:
From blunt force trauma to the head: 2
From near suffocation:  1

Nancy's Skills:
She is an excellent runner and outruns Mary Mason at the end of the book when she tries to escape; Nancy trips her up so she can be taken into custody.

Nancy's Mysterious Souvenir:
A bracelet set with precious jewels

Case file:  
Nancy and Helen canoe down the river (as you do) to Lilac Inn, which their friend Emily Willoughby and her fiance are renovating and plan to open soon after their wedding; on the way their canoe hits something underwater and capsizes.  At the inn, they learn from Emily that strange things have been happening and she thinks the inn is jinxed.  They also meet John McBride, best friend to Emily's fiance; Hazel Willoughby, Emily's aunt and guardian; and Maud Potter, Aunt Hazel's friend and the inn's social director.  Emily tells Nancy that a waitress named Mary Mason recently quit because she said the inn was haunted.

Hannah calls Nancy at the inn and says they had a break-in at the Drew house, so Aunt Hazel offers to drive Nancy back to River Heights.  Aunt Hazel is going to the bank to retrieve Emily's inheritance of 20 unset diamonds worth over $50,000, which Emily plans to use to finance renovations on the inn.  Maud invites herself along on the trip and Nancy doesn't like her, not least because Maud wants to put the moves on Carson (which made me chortle a bit).  At home, Nancy finds that her charge plate (credit card) for a specific department store has been stolen; she goes to the store and the manager accuses her of stealing $2,000 of merchandise earlier that morning--Nancy has a doppelganger.

That evening, they have a festive dinner for Emily's birthday and Aunt Hazel presents the diamonds.  Immediately after, there's a crash and the lights go out, and when they come back on the diamonds are gone.  Noticing some crushed lilac petals on the floor, Nancy soon discovers a secret panel that leads from the private dining room through a closet and out to the lobby.  They search the inn and Nancy finds her stolen charge plate, which she reports to Chief McGinnis.  The next day, John finds a jewel case under one of the lobby windows with the diamonds inside; Emily decides to take the diamonds to a jeweler immediately who tells them that the stones are fakes.

Back at the inn, Nancy gets a phone message from John inviting her to go skin diving in the river to try to find out what made the canoe capsize at the start of the book.  She doesn't see John, but goes diving anyway and sees something mysterious and shark-shaped, but someone throws a spear at her and she bugs out.  At the inn, John says he saw Nancy earlier and she told him to meet her somewhere else (so the doppelganger was at the inn).  That night, Helen can't sleep so she goes out for a walk in the middle of the night and sees a black-haired girl in a glowing dress before she gets knocked unconscious.  Nancy wakes up, sees that Helen is gone and goes to look for her along with John.  Right after they find Helen, the girls' cottage explodes!

Carson stops by the next day and is inexplicably okay with Nancy continuing to investigate the diamond theft even after someone tried to blow her up.  She goes back to River Heights to get more clothes for herself and Helen since theirs were lost in the explosion, and she doesn't even tell Helen's mother what happened.  The HECK, Nancy!  She then decides to investigate Mary Mason, the waitress who quit, and finds her in Dockville, or thinks she does.  Back at the inn, Nancy dresses up as the ghost but before she can confront the other ghost, she's caught by the guard Emily hired.  Nancy continues to investigate for the next couple of days and notices that Gil the gardener, Jean Holmes the new waitress, and Maud Potter all act suspiciously.  Then Maud gets in a fight with Aunt Hazel and quits, but no one is sad to see her go because she had been so unpleasant.

On the inn's grounds, Nancy finds a note in a tree addressed to Lillie Merriweather, an actress, and signed by Gay; Nancy and Helen go to visit Lillie and find out Gay Moreau is an actress who had been sent to prison for check forgery.  They see a photo of Gay and deduce that she is Nancy's doppelganger; Nancy suspects that Gay is also Mary Mason and that the one she'd met in Dockville was a fake.  Back at the inn, Nancy sees Jean acting oddly so she follows her to the river, where she's caught by Jean, Gil, and another man and forced into the shark-shaped mini submarine.  The sub has to resurface and so the criminals transfer Nancy to a boat and hitch the sub to it.  Jean is actually Gay Moreau, Mary Mason, AND Nancy's doppelganger; she villain monologues at Nancy and shows her how she makes herself look like Nancy until the boat hits a log and starts to sink (like in the OT, only then they hit another boat).  Again, Nancy is left tied up in the cabin but gets rescued by River Police Patrol.  Gay and the men get arrested; Nancy and John go skin diving later and find Emily's stolen diamonds in Gay's makeup kit.  Turns out John, an Army major, had been tracking stolen electronics, and Gay's confederates had been behind those thefts.  Nancy gets a Distinguished Civilian Service Medal for helping John crack that case, and Emily gives Nancy a diamond pin shaped like a spray of lilacs.

Notes:
Wow, there is a lot going on in this one and I even skipped over many of the more minor details.  We still have the jewel theft from the first book, but this time most of the action takes place at Lilac Inn whereas in the OT it was just where the theft happened to take place.  I like that the inn is featured more in the RT, there is a lot of talk about lilacs, their history, and how they're sometimes called blue pipes.  This version is similar to the upcoming Password to Larkspur Lane, which is also floral themed.  Emily Crandall has changed to Emily Willoughby, and her guardian Jane Willoughby changes to guardian/aunt Hazel Willoughby (side note:  I really like the name Hazel).  Clara Potter becomes Maud Potter and is much more unpleasant in the RT.  Usually everyone adores Nancy except for the criminals, but Maud doesn't like her at all which is what makes her an effective red herring in the RT.  I like it.

Once again the shorter RT adds many more complicated details to the mystery.  The OT focused on the jewel theft, and in the RT we have a shark-shaped submarine (where does one even acquire a shark-shaped submarine???  Do James Bond style villains have their own shopping catalog?), skin diving, the stolen credit card, and Nancy's doppelganger.  I do like how Gay's motivation for impersonating Nancy was that Carson had helped to put her in prison for check forgery, so she wanted revenge on him.  Gay even tries to convince Carson that she's the real Nancy at the end of the book, until Nancy trips her and then rubs off her makeup.

The shark sub and the ghost subplot definitely lean into Scooby-Doo territory, and the John McBride/Army tech subplot feels shoehorned in a bit.  I could have done without those elements and more focus on the inn and the jewel theft like in the original.  Seems like a trend where the OTs are more straightforward and there are a lot more complicated subplots in the RTs even though they're shorter.

Nancy's Knockout Tally, RT Edition: 2 (she doesn't get knocked out in this one, way to go Nancy!)

Nancy's Skills:
Nancy is so good at skin diving that she had her picture in the paper with an accompanying story.  Must have been a slow news day in River Heights.

Nancy Drew, Fashion Model:
Nancy and Helen change into pastel cotton dresses when they arrive at the inn; they're supposed to wear "lilac pink" bridesmaid dresses for Emily's wedding.  At Emily's birthday dinner, Nancy wears a pink sheath dress and pumps (later "borrowed" by her doppelganger when she impersonates Nancy at the inn) while Helen wears an aqua organdy dress.  The next day Nancy puts on a casual sweater, skirt, and loafers to search for clues on the grounds, and later wears a green cotton dress.

Cooking with Hannah:
Hannah makes lunch for Nancy but there are no specifics.  At least in this version there's no question of Hannah leaving the Drews, which is a relief.  Unless Hannah comes to live with me, I'd like that.  She could teach me how to make apple pudding.

Nancy's Mysterious Souvenir:
A diamond pin shaped like a spray of lilacs

Rating:
4 stars for the OT, I didn't like the Hannah leaving/hiring a new housekeeper subplot in that one because it went on for so long.  4 stars for the RT, because I like how Lilac Inn is much more developed as a setting and there's a secret passage.  I'm a sucker for secret passages.  But I knocked off a star for the complicated subplots.

The Bungalow Mystery

Happy Drews-day and welcome to The Bungalow Mystery!

Top row are the OT versions with the Applewood OT edition on the right; bottom row are my two RT versions, with the one on the bottom right being the one I've had since childhood.

The Bill Gillies cover is on the two books on the left side, and I like it because it's the only one where Nancy is actually inside the house watching a criminal steal things from the wall safe, and it feels more high stakes than the other two since she's so close to the action.  Nancy's got a nice gold-and-green outfit happening here though I'd rather her top be a different color than her hair.  The OT book once belonged to Linda Thomas and was dated Christmas 1964.

On the Applewood cover (Russell Tandy, I think, or maybe he just did the interior illustrations), Nancy is once again wearing a cloche hat so we can't actually see what color her hair is.  This is the third Applewood cover in a row where Nancy is wearing blue, I think that was actually a note established in the Stratemeyer Syndicate that blue is Nancy's favorite color.

For the bottom right Nappi cover, Nancy is observing the bungalow from a distance and she's wearing the forest green dress mentioned in the RT, which is a nice detail.  Also her hair is definitely red here instead of blonde.

My favorite cover is the Gillies one, I like that it's an action scene.  Also if I got to choose, I would have moved the title over to the right a bit on the Nappi cover so it's all against the sky and not somewhat obscured by the tree.

So let's take a look at the OT version.

Case file:
Nancy and Helen Corning are staying at a camp on Moon Lake (just like in The Secret of the Old Clock) and take the camp motorboat out on the lake when a vicious storm rolls in.  They accidentally hit a log and sink the boat (I wonder if this is the same boat that gave Nancy such trouble in Old Clock?); Helen is not a good swimmer so Nancy has to help her stay afloat, but they get rescued by 16-year-old Laura Pendleton in a rowboat.  They take shelter in a boathouse and Laura tells them that her mother recently died, so she's waiting at the Lakeside Hotel to meet her new guardian, Jacob Aborn.

The next day, Nancy and Helen go to visit Laura at the hotel and meet Mr. Aborn, who says that they are leaving immediately for his bungalow on Melrose Lake.  The girls instinctively dislike Mr. Aborn because he seems to want to get Laura away from them immediately and they hear him yell at her.  They go back to camp for a few more days and Nancy teaches Helen how to swim.  Nancy leaves for River Heights and gets caught in another storm; a pine tree gets struck by lightning and falls right in front of her car, and who shows up then but Laura Pendleton, who has run away from her guardian.  Together they move the tree and go to Nancy's house.

Laura tells Nancy that Mr. Aborn is dictatorial and mean.  They have no servants at the bungalow (gasp!!), he expects Laura to keep the house and tells her that she's got less than $15,000 in her inheritance when she thought it was closer to $50-60,000 (and that's in 1930s money).  He took her fur coat and tried to take her mother's jewels, but Laura has them with her.  Nancy asks Laura to write a letter to Aborn saying that she refuses to accept his guardianship, and Nancy goes back to Melrose Lake.  She sees Aborn taking a small parcel to a dilapidated bungalow; he sees her trying to look in the window (cover scene) and says he's looking for Laura because she's mentally unbalanced.

Nancy pretends to leave, but follows Aborn back to his house and spies on him.  He conveniently talks to himself about what he's doing and calls himself Stumpy.  She goes back to the dilapidated bungalow, breaks in through a window and discovers the real Jacob Aborn held prisoner in the cellar, unconscious and ill.  Nancy revives him and he tells her how Stumpy took him prisoner, but then Stumpy shows up and pistol-whips Nancy into unconsciousness.  She wakes up as he's tying her up; she remembers that a detective once showed her a trick to how to hold her hands when being tied up that will make it possible to slip out of the bonds later so she tries to do that.  Stumpy has a villain monologue moment and then leaves Nancy and Jacob to starve in the cellar.

Despite being dizzy from the blow to the head, Nancy eventually manages to get out of her bindings and unlocks Aborn.  They get back to Nancy's roadster and check out Aborn's house, but Stumpy is gone.  Nancy leaves Aborn there since he's so ill and weak, and she goes to a nearby hotel to call the police and a doctor.  She tries to call her house to check on Laura and Hannah but gets no response; the hotel clerk agrees to spread the word to the police and radio stations to be on the lookout for Stumpy.

Meanwhile back in River Heights, Laura is worried about Nancy, so when Carson gets home she tells him what's happened and they hop in his car to go find Nancy.  They happen to meet up with Nancy on the road and she says she's trying to figure out where Stumpy went.  They choose the road leading to the town of Hamilton and catch up to his racing car and there's a protracted car chase.  Carson even fires his revolver trying to get Stumpy to stop, but at a sharp curve Stumpy's car goes over a cliff.  Carson, Nancy, and Laura climb down to rescue the unconscious Stumpy, and Nancy grabs his suitcase with Laura's bank securities just before the car explodes.

Carson and Laura take Stumpy to the hospital in Carson's car (a brown sedan), while Nancy follows in her blue roadster with the suitcase.  They talk to the Hamilton police chief who says that Stumpy is in emergency surgery.  Nancy insists that they take Laura back to Melrose Lake immediately so she can meet the real Jacob Aborn.  Once there, they open the suitcase and find Laura's fortune, which is over $100,000 in bank securities.  They go to visit Laura again a few days later; she and the real Jacob are very happy together and Stumpy is recovering in jail, where he belongs.  Laura gives Nancy "a beautiful pendant of precious stones" as a thank you.

Notes:
I wrote down this quote:  "To think was to act with Nancy Drew" and yep, true.  I've noticed that the author (hi Mildred) frequently calls Nancy by her full name.  It's mentioned that Carson smokes cigars, and I don't think I've come across anyone smoking in the RTs yet.  Like in the previous two OTs, this version features guns--Stumpy beats Nancy over the head with his gun, and Carson shoots at Stumpy's car during the car chase, which surprised me since I grew up with the gun-free RTs.

Nancy's Knockout Tally, OT Edition:  2

Cooking with Hannah:
She makes waffles for Nancy and Laura.

Nancy's Mysterious Souvenir:
A pendant of precious stones that belonged to Laura's mother.

Revised case file:
Nancy and Helen are tooling around Twin Lakes on a motorboat when a wicked storm blows up and their boat sinks; they get rescued by a girl named Laura Pendleton, and the trio immediately break into a ramshackle bungalow to take shelter until the storm passes.  Laura becomes insta-buddies with Nancy and Helen, and she confides that her mother recently died and she's supposed to meet her new guardians the next day at a hotel.  Nancy and Helen go to Laura's hotel the next afternoon to see how she's getting on and meet her new guardians, the Aborns, but get a weird vibe off them.  Helen splits off with her Aunt June to go work on wedding stuff and she's gone for the rest of the book.

When she finds out that Hannah has sprained her ankle, Nancy leaves Twin Lakes and has to take a detour road towards Melrose Lake when she gets caught in another storm.  A tree falls down, but soon thereafter teenagers Jim and Cathy Donnell drive up and help her move the tree; it turns out they know the Aborns and are looking forward to making friends with Laura.  When Nancy gets home, Hannah tells her that Carson wants her help on an embezzlement case in which it's suspected that some bank employees have been stealing securities from several branches of the bank.  Carson asks Nancy to interview four people whose bearer bonds were stolen and suss out if they could have been complicit in the theft.  She goes out to interview people and runs into Don Cameron, who had been her prom date in high school, and he invites her to a barbecue.

Nancy returns home and finds Laura there; she's run away from the Aborns because they keep asking her for her mother's jewels and they lock her in her room.  Laura grabbed the jewels and ran to Nancy's house; she shows Nancy and Hannah the jewelry collection before they lock it in Carson's safe.  Nancy goes back to sleuth around Melrose Lake; she checks into a hotel so she can sneak around after dark.  She climbs a rose trellis into Laura's bedroom and spies on the Aborns, who empty a safe of a whole lot of bank notes and stock certificates.  Nancy goes to the dilapidated bungalow and breaks in through a window; she finds the real Jacob Aborn like in the OT.

Nancy and Jacob spend too much time talking and he says the fake Aborn's name is really Stumpy Dowd; a Stephen Dowd had been on the list of people Nancy was supposed to interview but he wasn't home.  She now realizes that her mystery is related to Carson's embezzlement case.  Stumpy shows up and this time whacks Nancy over the head with a cane because no one has guns in the revised versions.  Meanwhile, Carson is concerned about Nancy when he finds out she went back to the Aborn house, so he, Laura, and Don Cameron pile in the car and go to find her (Nancy had pawned Laura off on Don for the barbecue while she went sleuthing).

Nancy uses the same detective trick from the OT to get out of her bonds; she unlocks Jacob and they go to her car, but Stumpy has sabotaged it so it won't run.  They go to the Aborn house and the Donnells show up because they're friends with the real Aborns and Mrs. Aborn had called them when she couldn't reach Jacob.  They call the police and then Carson, Nancy, and Don go to the ramshackle bungalow that Nancy, Helen, and Laura broke into at the start of the book because that's where the rest of Stumpy's gang has been hiding out.  This time Carson gets knocked on the head and passes out for a while, but once he's revived they still chase after Stumpy and his gang, there's a car accident, and Nancy grabs the suitcases full of cash just before the car explodes.  Laura is glad to be with her real guardians who are much nicer than the impostors, and she gives Nancy an aquamarine ring that had belonged to her mother as a thank you.

Notes:
This one is somewhere in between The Secret of the Old Clock and The Hidden Staircase in regards to how much of the plot is changed between the versions, and this time the RT is much more convoluted even though it's five chapters shorter.  There are a lot more characters too.  In the OT, it's just Stumpy by himself; in the RT, we get Stumpy, his wife, and their two co-conspirators, plus Don Cameron, the Donnell family, and the people that Nancy interviews on Carson's behalf, and also Jacob Aborn's wife even though she only shows up at the end of the book.  They do a good job of connecting the bank embezzlement case to Laura's case though--her mother had put all their money in the bank that the criminals were stealing from.  It's a bit less clear which bungalow is the titular one, since there's the one the girls break into at the start, the Aborn house is a bungalow, and the place where the real Aborn was held prisoner is also a bungalow.  I remember as a kid wondering what the heck a bungalow was as this was the first place I'd ever read the word.

I admit, when I read this a couple of months ago I wondered why on earth a 16-year-old was staying in a hotel by herself for days on end waiting for her guardians to show up because that seems very negligent on someone's part, but it does specifically say at the end of the book that the Dowds had arranged for Laura to leave her boarding school early so they could get to her.  They do spell out a lot of complicated stuff with how the embezzlement scheme worked, how the criminals found out about Laura and her fortune, etc.

When Laura goes to the Drew home, Nancy shows her the Crowley clock from her first case and a silver urn, but until I read the OT Hidden Staircase I didn't know where the urn came from because it's not mentioned in the RT.

I'm listening to a couple of Nancy Drew podcasts; the host of one of them says there are an awful lot of boating accidents in the Drew-niverse and she's not wrong.  Nancy and Helen sink their motorboat in both versions of this book; Laura's dad perished in a boating accident in the RT.  I'm going to be on the lookout for future boating accidents.

Near the end, when Carson and Nancy are discussing the connections between the embezzlement case and Laura's fake guardians, Carson talks about his old friend Chief McGinnis.  He hasn't shown up yet in the OTs so I'm watching for that; he was just name-dropped in The Hidden Staircase RT and this book.  Also Carson's secretary, Miss Hanson, gets a mention in the RT for the first time.

Nancy's Knockout Tally, RT Edition:  2
Carson's Knockout Tally, RT Edition:  1

Nancy's Skills:
Nancy is an excellent swimmer and saves Helen in both versions; in the OT she then teaches Helen how to swim but that was cut out of the RT.  Also she has some talents at breaking and entering, which she does at the first bungalow, the Aborn house, and the prison bungalow.  Such a criminal, Nancy.

Nancy Drew, Fashion Model:
When interviewing people for Carson, Nancy wears what is described as a two-piece navy blue dress (um, I think that would be classified as a skirt and top, not a dress) that makes her look older, along with low-heeled pumps and tiny pearl earrings.  She wears a forest green cotton dress and flat-heeled shoes to go to Melrose Lake, which is pictured on the last cover.  She puts on a simple black cotton dress and pumps for dinner at the hotel, and then changes into a sweater, skirt, and walking shoes to go tramping through the woods.  Where are your jeans, Nancy?!

Cooking with Hannah:  The Drews have a "modern pink-and-white kitchen" which I find pretty funny for some reason.  After injuring herself, Hannah refuses to stay off her feet and makes pancakes and sausages with fresh orange juice for breakfast and a fresh fruit salad and rolls for lunch.  She makes tea and toast when Laura is distraught, and at the end when Laura comes over to get her jewels, she makes iced tea and open-faced sandwiches.

Nancy's Mysterious Souvenir:
An aquamarine ring that matches Nancy's eyes and used to belong to Laura's mother.

Rating:  Five stars for the OT, four for the RT because they made things so much more complicated.