Read Nancy Drew and the Clue Crew 21 – Double Take free for 7 days. £7.99/month after - less than a paperback.
Carolyn Keene's Double Take is a Nancy Drew and the Clue Crew mystery for 8 year olds where the Clue Crew get some very annoying competition.
Nancy, Bess and George are best friends in third grade at River Heights Elementary. At lunch, Nadine turns up in a brand-new pink hoodie with a silver sequin heart on the back and a famous actress's autograph in the middle. Everyone wants one (Deirdre most of all).
By the end of the day it's vanished from Nadine's backpack.
Nadine asks the Clue Crew to find it. Then Deirdre, Madison and Kendra march up with a pile of bright orange fliers. They're a detective club too. The Klue Krew. With K's!
So now it's a contest. Whoever finds the hoodie first gets to be the number-one detective club in school.
Honestly, the Klue Krew are the best thing in it. Matching trench coats, dark glasses, code names like Agent Double Oh One, and a notebook full of wildly wrong theories. The gym teacher hums a Lula song, so he must be guilty! Deirdre even posts on her website that they're about to crack the case.
The real clues are small and fair. A single silver sequin on the locker room floor. A sweet wrapper in locker 24. A ransom note with three spelling mistakes. Your reader sees everything Nancy sees, so they can try to beat her to it.
The suspects are good fun as well. Antonio pretends to spill a whole bowl of chili over the hoodie, just for a laugh. New girl Violet offers Nadine her entire life savings for it (twenty-one dollars and fifty-eight cents, or possibly fifty-nine).
It's a gentle sort of mystery. The crime is a missing hoodie, and a lot of it is about who's been a bit sneaky and who's brave enough to own up.
It's very American, with cubbies, third grade and Tater Tots at lunch, so a younger reader might want the odd word explained.
This is book 21 in the Clue Crew series. If Deirdre's bossiness gets a laugh, she's back in Cupcake Chaos, snapping photos for her blog when a swarm of live ladybugs ruins a new café's grand opening.
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