Nancy Drew Clue Book 9 – Springtime Crime

Carolyn Keene's Springtime Crime is the ninth Nancy Drew Clue Book, a mystery for 8 year olds that turns on a pop star's flower hat.

What happens

River Heights is holding its first flower sculpture show. Everything is made out of peonies. There's a poodle, a giant cupcake, a robot and a high-heeled shoe, all in white and pink.

Nancy, Bess and George are eight years old and they call themselves the Clue Crew. Nancy keeps a clue book in her pocket and a purple pen tucked inside it.

Then a woman in a trench coat and dark glasses stops them. It's Miss LaLa, their favourite singer, and she needs somewhere cold to keep her hat until Sunday. It's covered in fresh white peonies and nobody is supposed to see it yet.

George's mum is a caterer with an enormous fridge. Perfect.

Except that the next morning the hat comes out brown and droopy, and George can't swear she locked the kitchen door.

What's nice about this one is that the detecting is all stuff a child could actually do. Nancy checks the ice cream in the freezer to work out whether there's been a power cut (melted and refrozen ice cream goes lumpy, so smooth ice cream means no blackout). She notices a smell of roses where there are no roses. She counts the empty pizza boxes in a suspect's workroom and works out how long somebody has been up.

The suspects are fun too. Monsieur Pierre sculpts poodles out of peonies and is furious that a singer is the star of the show instead of him. Madame Withers makes perfume from dead flowers and has names like Rotting Roses and Limpy Lavender.

It's very silly in the right places. A boy sprays his cupcake sculpture with what he is quite certain is hair spray, chatting away, while the girls watch one whole side of it turn brown.

Your reader will probably be a few pages ahead of the Clue Crew in one or two places, which is the point. Short chapters, plenty of dialogue and no scary bits, so it suits a child who wants a proper whodunnit without anything actually frightening in it.

What to read next

If they finish this one still wanting to be the one who works it out, Boo Crew has the same three girls auditioning for a Halloween talent show in a theatre that everyone says is haunted.