Nancy Drew and the Clue Crew 10 – Ticket Trouble

Ticket Trouble is a Nancy Drew and the Clue Crew mystery by Carolyn Keene for 8 year olds, about a stack of fairground tickets that goes missing with an hour of the fair left.

What happens

The autumn festival at River Heights Elementary has taken over the school playing fields. There's a roller coaster, a bouncy house, arcade booths standing where the football goals were yesterday, and a chilli cook-off.

Nancy is eight here, not a teenager. So are her two best friends, Bess and George, who are cousins and could not be less alike.

Everyone has bought a pack of twenty tickets. Rides cost one, games cost one, and when they're gone, they're gone.

Then Ned Nickerson comes running across the grass. He'd put his tickets down on the counter of the ball-throwing booth for one second, and now they aren't there.

He'd raked leaves all week to pay for most of them. His mum told him to keep them in his pocket. He didn't.

Out comes Nancy's little purple notebook.

The first clue is a fresh scratch through red paint on the counter, made by something pointy. The counter was only painted yesterday, which is a very satisfying thing to work out.

The second is a big black crow that keeps landing near people and singing along, extremely badly, with the music.

Three older girls nearby seem to have more tickets than they started with, which does look bad for them.

The nice thing about these is how fairly they play. The clues are all on the page, nothing needs grown-up knowledge, and your reader has a real chance of getting there before Nancy does. Each scene adds exactly one thing.

There's a nice bit where Bess explains that arcade games are built so you lose. The milk jugs are weighted at the bottom, so hitting the top one does nothing. Aim between the two at the bottom instead, she says, and then does it, and walks off with a teddy bear.

This is an American book and it doesn't hide it. Third grade, fall festival, chili, soda. None of it is confusing, but a young reader may ask.

Nancy is also written as a bit of a daydreamer, tuning out mid-conversation because she's heard something the others haven't. It's a friendlier version of the detective than the older books, and it suits this age.

What to read next

If this one goes down well, Ski School Sneak takes the same three girls away for a weekend on a beginners' ski slope, where the store room gets wrecked and Bess ends up in the frame for it.