Nancy Drew In The "Modern Age"
This was originally published in 1998 when the computer age was just starting and throughout the story I was CACKLING at the mentions of things that are now ancient but were once shiny and new: e-mail (for starters), Dial Up, floppy discs, not being able to use a phone and the computer at the same time because the computer was tied into the phone line.....the nostalgia was strong with this book.
Okay, let's get down to our basics.
Characters: Carson and Nancy Drew, Bess Marvin, and their suspects: Henry Yi, Byron Thomas, and Blaine Warner
Premise: Nancy and Bess investigate when Carson's clients start settling out of court.
For those who haven't been in the world of Nancy Drew before (and as a refresher for those who haven't visited this world in a while) Carson Drew is a prominent lawyer while his daughter, Nancy has made a name for herself solving mysteries alongside her friends George Fayne and Bess Marvin, starting from The Secret Of The Old Clock. This is number 144 in the series, though the original works stop at number 56. Okay back to our current story. From the premise you would think: "Oh, they probably just changed their mind and decided not to go to trial", which, yeah, it happens, but Carson was concerned because the clients were deciding to settle after their initial call to take a case to court, meaning that someone was using information on the client to scare them into settling so Nancy got her sleuthing on to solve the case with help from Bess, who turns out to be quite knowledgeable about computers, though by no means an expert at them.
After some investigating, Nancy discovers that her father's colleague, Blaine Warner (and I kept wanting to call her Blair, thank you, Facts Of Life) was stealing the information and giving it to someone in a rival firm so that the son of the boss could move on up the corporate ladder. (Yay ambition). Unlike earlier Nancy Drew stories, you don't really get a motive for Blaine's actions, so I'm gonna just take a wild guess and say, greed. I'm assuming she got some kickbacks from her partner with every case they made settle.
In all honesty, as much as I love this series, the later books aren't quite as good as their earlier counterparts. Whereas earlier books had at least twenty chapters (twenty-five if you read the original stories), these only have sixteen chapters, and a lot of the later stories are written as your typical action adventures, jumping from scene-to-scene. Nothing wrong with that, it just leaves some things to be desired. As for how Nancy got a lot of her information, I don't know if what she did was legal, I'd have to ask. I mean, it seemed like it was to me, but for a law firm, their computer security was relatively lax with everyone knowing everybody's password. To be fair though, this was at the beginning of the computer age---relatively speaking---so some suspension of belief is given here, even though I personally think that a law firm would know better, but again, that's just me.
One thing I really enjoyed about this book (besides the above-mentioned nostalgia factor) is that without her cousin George around (she was on a vacation elsewhere), Bess got a chance to shine as the main person Nancy turned to for computer information/help. You don't see that much for Bess in the series. Usually she's more of the boy-crazy/food loving gal who doesn't want to get hurt during Nancy's investigation and George is the more daring one, which means that Bess usually feels more like she's just in George's shadow.
Despite the problems I mentioned, overall, I enjoyed the book as it's always fun to return to the world of Nancy Drew and to read about her adventures and new mysteries. I'd definitely recommend this if you're feeling nostalgic and I'd give the book itself an 8.
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