Nancy Drew Clue Book 10 – Boo Crew

Boo Crew, from Carolyn Keene's Nancy Drew Clue Book series, is a Halloween mystery for 8 year olds that stops near the end and asks your reader to name the culprit.

What happens

A television talent show has taken over the old Heights Theater, which has just reopened after seventy years shut, and is holding auditions for children there over one weekend.

Nancy, Bess and George are going on as three witch sisters with a cauldron, a bottle of strawberry bubble bath and a duffel bag of fake toad toenails.

Then the acts start going wrong. Rubber spiders drop all over the spider dancers. Something in the werewolf mask makes Kevin sneeze instead of howl. And the witches' brew erupts green across the stage and nearly reaches the judges.

The producer cancels the auditions. She gives everyone until Sunday night.

The detective work is satisfyingly ordinary. The girls find a shopping bag shoved under a table with the sneezing powder and the bubble mixture still in it, and a till receipt with the date and the time printed on it. That receipt is the whole case. From there it is just working out who could have been in the shop at five o'clock on Friday, and who could have got into the prop room before half past seven on Saturday.

Suspects go on the list and come off it again. A boy with something wriggling in his hoodie pocket. A famous comedian who turns out to have been a menace at primary school. A hundred-year-old witch's curse, which Bess is determined to keep on the list.

There is a piano upstairs playing with nobody at it, and shapes dancing behind a window, and both of those get proper explanations. That's useful if you have a child who enjoys a spooky setting but doesn't want an actual ghost in it.

The jokes come thick and fast and most of them are terrible in the way eight year olds love. Monsters shop at boo-tiques. A werewolf's favourite story is a hairy-tale.

Then the book stops. Three questions on a page, an instruction to get a piece of paper, and a choice about whether to turn over. Your reader can play along properly or find out straight away, and either is fine.

One note for a British household. It is very American. Third grade, candy corn, caramel apples and a corn maze at the Fall Fair. None of it blocks the story.

What to read next

If they enjoy being handed the clue book, there are more. In A Star Witness the astronomy club visits a planetarium, a one-of-a-kind telescope is on loan from Germany for one night only, and it goes missing.