Nancy Drew Diaries 2 – Strangers on a Train

Carolyn Keene's Strangers on a Train is the second Nancy Drew Diaries mystery for 9 year olds, and it carries straight on with Nancy's cruise around Alaska.

What happens

That matters. This one opens by telling you how the first case turned out, so if you haven't read Curse of the Arctic Star yet, start there.

The ship is docking in Skagway, an old gold-rush town, and Becca has news. The jewellery shop on board was robbed in the last port. The police have caught the thief on land, but nobody can work out how he got onto the ship. Did somebody help him?

Nancy's still undercover, and Bess's boyfriend Alan still doesn't know why the girls are really on board. Then he turns up on the stairs at exactly the wrong moment. How much did he hear?

The day ashore goes wrong almost at once. A kind busboy is sacked right there on the dock. A man in a Hawaiian shirt who's always hanging around the crew pushes his way in. And on a scenic train ride into the mountains, Nancy steps out between the carriages for some air and gets a VERY nasty fright from someone she thought she could trust.

So it's time to make a new suspect list. Half the fun is that the list keeps changing. Nancy's tired and grumpy after a five o'clock wake-up call she never asked for, and she's honest about it (George knocking her bagel on the floor didn't help).

It's written like her diary, so you hear her talk herself into a theory and straight back out again. Bess and George are lovely with her. George tells her she might be seeing villains because she's half asleep. She might be right!

It's worth knowing that the busboy is sacked because illegal drugs are found in his locker. He swears he's never seen them. Nobody takes anything and it's only talked about, but a younger reader may ask what it means. That train moment sits right by a long drop too, which is tense for a few pages.

If your reader liked the first book's cast, it's great fun to spot the same faces turning up again ashore.

What to read next

If it's the holiday-gone-wrong feel they love, A Nancy Drew Christmas has Nancy at the grand reopening of a ski lodge in Montana. This time she's on her own, with her leg in plaster.