Nancy Drew and the Clue Crew 24 – Princess Mix-Up Mystery

Carolyn Keene's Princess Mix-up Mystery is a giggly Nancy Drew and the Clue Crew case for 8 year olds, and it starts with a makeover that goes very, very wrong.

What happens

Nancy is eight. She and her best friends Bess and George run a detective club called the Clue Crew, and it's spring break in River Heights.

A new princess parlour is opening in town. To celebrate, there's a contest to guess how many peas are hidden under a mattress, just like the fairy tale. The prize is a royal makeover for the winner and two friends.

Nancy guesses one pea. Wrong! Then George, who would honestly rather be playing basketball, climbs onto the mattress to fetch a dropped ten-dollar bill. The crowd makes her guess. She says fifty-five (the number in a bag of frozen peas) and wins.

So the next day, all three are sitting on velvet thrones. The finishing touch is a strawberry hair spray. Except it smells of rotten eggs. And their hair is turning BLUE!

Worse, a newspaper photographer snaps them, and the parlour has to close. The Clue Crew are sure somebody swapped that bottle on purpose. But who? Two science-club girls who say they'd have won the contest? The grumpy yoga teacher upstairs? A basketball player with suspiciously blue fingers?

It's a lovely mix of silly and sensible. Nancy collects clues in little plastic bags. Bess builds her own gadgets (her magnifying specs make her eyes look like a bug's). George is funny and blunt and will tell you exactly what she thinks, usually about anything pink.

The girls do some proper detective thinking too. At one point they time themselves swapping water between two bottles, to see whether a suspect could have done it in five minutes. That's exactly the sort of thing your reader might want to try at the kitchen sink!

If you've got a reader who loves a whodunnit with plenty of giggles and three friends at the heart of it, this is a good one. The chapters are short, the case is gentle and it's quick to get into.

It's American, so expect dollars and third grade.

What to read next

For another case with the same trio, try Ticket Trouble, set at their school's autumn festival, where the trouble is all about tickets.