Nancy Drew Diaries #19, #20, #21

The updated Nancy Drew series, these are written in the first person and show Nancy as a fairly average girl - albeit with some pretty good sleuthing abilities, Bess Marvin is still blonde and pretty and charms all the boys, and George is still tombyish, a tech wizard, and constantly thinking about food. George is portrayed as almost gender neutral (especially in the later books) and I do find it amusing that she is not as athletic as in the Classic Mysteries, and that she has taken on Bess' role of foodie. After hundreds of books of George fat-shaming Bess, she is now the one whose appetite needs monitoring!!
19) THE STOLEN SHOW Nancy, Bess and George are in Quebec to help a friend at an international dog show when they stumble onto an international jewellery smuggling ring. In fairness, Nancy would never have found out about it if the baddies hadn't kidnapped Bess to start with, but hey, where would we be if her enemies were smart? The ending is pretty fun where nancy gathers all her suspects together and revelas their secrets ala Poirot, and then deals with an attack Doberman
20)HIDDEN PICTURES Not great. The girls are investigating a curse on a dead photographer - people are disappearing INTO photographs. A rival of the long-dead photographer cusred him, saying that if ever his photos were shown in public, disaster would follow. A struggling gallery in a nearby town is showing the photographs and one of the assistants vanishes and then reappears in one of the old photos on display. Nancy receives a note asking her to investigate. This whole concept was dumb, and I didn't even understand the motivation behind the non-crime. It was just plain daft.
21)THE VANISHING STATUE Also not good. I wasn't entirely sure what the whole mystery here was - was it a stolen statue? Is it art theft? Forgery? Who knows! Bess appears to be semi-dating a complete weirdo performance artist (in fact all the arty people are portrayed as total whack-jobs) and George seems to be coming out of the closet. The girls all attend a party hosted by a wealthy and eccentric art hoarder, and for some reason Nancy and Bess actually make their own dresses (Nancy goes as 'Classic' Nancy Drew) while George goes all out as Nancy's date and dresses as a very dapper James Bond - bringing her a corsage and all. I enjoyed the earlier books in the Diaries series, but these last three are just plain odd. The storytelling isn't bad per se it's just that the stories themselves are weird and not very mysterious.

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