Friday, July 25, 2014

Nancy Drew Girl Detective #39-41: The Eco Mystery Trilogy

The Nancy Drew Girl Detective Eco-Mystery Trilogy consists of the following titles.

#39  Green-Eyed Monster
#40  Green with Envy
#41  Seeing Green

I really like the cover art to all three books in this trilogy.  These are the only trilogy books where I actually like the cover art.

In #39 Green-Eyed Monster, George wins a trip to an eco-resort in Costa Rica.  Nancy and Bess go on the trip with her.  The resort's grand opening is days away, and the girls are part of a press tour.  Upon the guests' arrival, their luggage goes missing.  Soon, it becomes apparent that someone is sabotaging the resort.

Exactly why does this series have Nancy and her friends spend so much time in Costa Rica?  They have already been to Costa Rica in #8 The Scarlet Macaw Scandal and in #25 Trails of Treachery, and now they go to Costa Rica again.

The culprit of this book is too extremely obvious.  I knew it from early in the story.  These trilogies all seem to start out with a very predictable first volume.

Near the end, Nancy discovers the culprit.  But then at the very end, she discovers that the culprit is not responsible for all the sabotage.  This is getting really old.  Every trilogy involves one or more culprits who are not the real culprit. 

In #40 Green with Envy, Nancy, Bess, and George continue their stay at the resort as they try to find the second saboteur.  The second book is pretty much just like the first book.

On page 2, Nancy tells the reader that "people like to call me Nancy Drew, Girl Detective."  Gosh, I would have never guessed.

On page 34, we learn that Bess won the trip to Costa Rica.  The problem is that George won the trip.  This is a bizarre inconsistency.

On page 112, Nancy reflects that they might never visit Costa Rica again.  I don't see why not.  They have already been there three times!

I got really annoyed at the end.  We learn that the culprit from the first book is not really the culprit but that someone else is the culprit.  Then, at the very end of the second book, we learn that the second culprit is not responsible for everything, so we have another culprit.  Every Nancy Drew Girl Detective trilogy goes just like this.

In #41 Seeing Green, Nancy, Bess, and George arrive back in River Heights.  Nancy is immediately abducted by the culprit, as in the real culprit of this trilogy.

The back cover of this book has a summary that mentions how Nancy is to investigate "Cristobal's mysterious American girlfriend" and then mentions Cristobal and his girlfriend twice more in the summary.  This is a huge mistake.  Enrique has the American girlfriend, not Cristobal!  Cristobal is married.  How could they screw the summary up that bad?

A scene from page 56 is hilarious.  Nancy has two police officers following her for protection, and she wishes to lose them.  She goes to Ned's dorm, where Ned stages a diversion by having someone else microwave some popcorn for a much longer time than needed.  The smoke detectors go off.
Already, chaos was spreading through the dorm, as students threw open their doors and ran into the hall.

"What the heck?"

"Omigod, not popcorn again!"

"Who did it?  Oh, man, was it those cops?"

"Oh no!  What are cops doing here, anyway?  Is someone in trouble?"
I greatly enjoyed the first and last books in this trilogy.  I did not enjoy the second book very much, since it mainly rehashed the first book.  This trilogy would have been better as just two books.

2 comments:

Barrett LeRoy said...

It's obvious by this time that the series could not be saved. S & S was obviously planning a reboot by the end of this trilogy by the way the next two are laid out. But, even then, Diaries #4 was obviously written as a GD book and #5 & #6 had some traits of it.

Ryan said...

This was the last trilogy I enjoyed. It was definitely repetitive in plot, but the last book was good enough to make me forget. There were only parts of the Sabotage trilogy I liked and the Malibu Mayhem trilogy was a disaster.
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