A Family Of Detectives

 We are returning to my childhood again.  This time, the Hardy Boys in The Twisted Claw (I kept having Are You Afraid Of The Dark? flashbacks with this one. 😄) by Franklin W. Dixon. Growing up, I read this series just as much as I read Nancy Drew and I loved them both.  If you're not familiar with the series, Fenton was a detective for the Bayport Police (a fictional town that was located somewhere close to New York City) before retiring from the force and becoming a private investigator.  His sons, Frank and Joe, picked up his knack for investigating and solving crimes/mysteries.

Characters: Fenton, Frank, and Joe Hardy (with appearances by Aunt Gertrude, Chet and Iola Morton, and Fenton's pilot friend Sam Radley).

Premise: The Hardys investigate when pieces of a specific collection go missing from various museums. 

To be truthful, as much as I love them, the Hardy Boys (as well as Nancy Drew) tend to be formulatic (not an actual word, I know, just deal with it 😀) in that they get called into or stumble onto a mystery, investigate, become endangered or injured, and then find the final clue that solves the whole thing with police showing up to arrest the crooks.  But that's okay.  These were geared towards a younger crowd.  

Getting back on track, Fenton enlists Frank and Joe's help to discover how thieves keep breaking into various museums to steal items that are part of a single collection: the Degraw Collection.  The collection itself has an interesting backstory of a pirate named Cartoll who had a bunch of followers and they were called The Order Of The Claw. So yeah, I can see why that would be a hit and I can see the sense in letting different museums have different pieces.  If it's all in one place, you go there and you look at it, but if the items are separated, you're able to say "Hey, this part of the collection is here" and other museums get some traction. Well, anyhoos, everyone's baffled cause they can't figure out how the thieves are bypassing the alarms/security which include laser grids.  Yes, like the kind you see in the movies.  

With Frank and Joe on the case, it's discovered that two boats, the Black/Yellow Parrots (parrots/pirates, get it? 😂 Just me? Okay, fine, tough crowd) as well as a truck are being used to transport the jewels, etc. in hollowed out tree logs, which, okay, I don't know how they would do this or how much time it would take even they only used two or three and had the rest be regular logs, but I think that's pretty dang clever.  Another clever thing is the revelation of how they managed to bypass the laser grids.  They used a devise to make sure that the grids weren't interrupted meaning that the alarms wouldn't go off.  As to who was behind the robberies: it was the great-great-great grandson of the pirate who believed that the pieces belonged to him through inheritance, which, Sir, they were stolen by your ancestor and that's not how it works, at all.

As kid-friendly mysteries go, this one was pretty exciting and just like with the E-Mail Mystery in the Nancy Drew series, it was fun to return to old friends, even though Iola only had one scene.  Her brother, Chet though, appeared more often and in what I feel was a surprising twist for these stories, he was actually pretty eager to go along on the adventure whereas in most books, I've always found him a bit hesitant to be in on the action, though he, like Bess Marvin, always comes through in a pinch.  This was a fun mystery and I give it a 9.