Nancy Drew Diaries 16 – The Haunting on Heliotrope Lane

Carolyn Keene's The Haunting on Heliotrope Lane is the sixteenth Nancy Drew Diaries mystery, a spooky case for 9 year olds about a girl who hasn't been herself since she went down into a haunted basement.

What happens

Nancy doesn't believe in ghosts. She tells you so in capital letters right at the start (and then admits that every so often a case makes her wonder).

She's just sat through a horror double bill with Bess, George and Ned, and she's decided scary films aren't for her. Then a girl called Willa leaps out at them in a dark car park.

Willa and her best friend Izzy crept into an empty house on Heliotrope Lane. An old woman died in a little room in its basement, and her son vanished the same day. Izzy went down to that room on her own. When Willa found her, Izzy looked at her like a stranger, and afterwards she couldn't remember going to the house at all.

Since then bubbly Izzy has turned snappy and suspicious. She's threatened to hit Willa. And when Nancy and George try to ask her about the house, her voice drops to something deep and strange and she grabs Willa's wrist hard enough to leave a mark.

So is it a ghost, or is somebody hiding behind a ghost story? That's the fun of it. Nancy is sensible and a bit of a scaredy-cat at the same time, which makes her very good company. She and her friends creep through the wrecked house by torchlight, and every creak makes them jump (a rat runs over George's foot, and nobody is ever allowed to mention it again).

Nancy tells it all herself, so you're right beside her as she talks herself in and out of being frightened.

The opening is properly spooky for this shelf. The friends swap the goriest bits of the film they've just seen, organs and all. There's talk of possession, a face painted on a bathroom mirror and a LOT of screaming. Nancy is old enough to drive and has a boyfriend, and Willa and Izzy are around thirteen. A reader who scares easily might like it in daylight. One who loves a shiver will be delighted.

What to read next

If they want another spooky case for Nancy to get to the bottom of, The Ghost of Grey Fox Inn sends Nancy, Bess and George to Charleston for a family wedding, staying at an inn that's supposed to be haunted.