—
You know how we always joke about the need for alcohol while reading these books? I attempted to start this book when I got home on Saturday night and found that Lor has been speaking the truth all along: in spite of the fact that there’s a murder in every single book, these things somehow manage to be painfully boring. I managed about ten pages before I gave up and passed out.
Lorraine: See?! I’m totally not lying. And even if Nicole didn’t really believe me, the red flag should’ve been when I was all, “WUH? YOU WANT TO READ THIS BOOK? YES. YES. Take it. Now. I’ll mail you my copy right now. For free. I’ll actually send you money with it.”
Or something close to that.
Sweeney: I know, I should have expected this.
That said, I kind of feel like an ass for taking this one because it was probably not quite as bad as the others. For one, there was actual police involvement in this one. I guess they have cops in Florida, but not in whereeverthehellNancyisfromIforgotalreadysorry.
This book is also continuing a theme started over in Stoneybrook for this month’s posts: January has basically become THAT’S RACIST month here at Childhood Trauma. There is a whole lot of talk about “the illegals” and “Hispanic accents” as we introduce a handful of characters.
Lor: Goddamn that one piece and feathered bangs. Is it getting hot in hurr? Also, it’s Nancy standing in front of yet another random dude on the book cover.
Sweeney: Also, this is where Lor can comment on the accuracy of this portrayal of Florida, apparently you can’t walk down the street without being cat-called by everyone you pass? This is, I guess, a thing. In Florida.
Lor: Hmm. This is hard. I can assure you that you can look like Nancy Drew and walk down a street or on a beach or through the mall without being eye-raped constantly. But. I also feel that south Florida has a special level of skeeve not known to other geographical areas. Take that as you will.
Sweeney: We’ll call that portrayal’s accuracy a draw.
Also, as guys are harassing her – inviting her to private alcoves and offering to put on her sunscreen – she loves it. My experiences with being shouted at like that are that it’s usually super skeevy men and there is nothing pleasant about it, except maybe that I will laugh and ridicule these men to my friends later.
Anyway, I guess I should maybe tell you about the plot to this book, but we all know that plots aren’t really a big deal around these parts. It’s a string of contrivances and a happy ending . . .
Nancy and the Bovine Besties go to Fort Lauderdale for spring break. Apparently Nancy goes on a lot of vacations. Nancy’s friend Kim has been down there for a while and Kim’s mom asked Nancy to check-in on her and make sure she’s all right.
Lor: Is her phone line down? Was there not a more adult person around who could do said checking? No? No? No?
Sweeney: Is it bad that I’ve gotten so used to Babies Nonsensically Doing Grownup Things that this thought didn’t even occur to me until you pointed it out?
Nancy shows up at Kim’s hotel room and overhears Kim having a heated phone conversation and notices that the lock to her hotel room door had been broken open. I’d ask why this wasn’t the sort of thing a hotel would attempt to rectify or maybe relocate their guest or something like that but then I realize that this is WAY beyond the level of realistic detail I should expect from literary greats like Carolyn Keene and her Ghostwriting Collective.
Kim is talking to someone named Ricardo (all of “the illegals” have wonderfully predictable names like this) and saying that she told “her” to stay in the room but now “she” is gone. Kim agrees to go meet Ricardo at his “perch,” hangs up, and hurries out the door, right into Nancy.
Kim doesn’t explain what’s going on, just says she has to go and she’ll tell Nancy later, but Nancy is trying to keep up with her anyway and then BAM, Kim gets hit by a car, that speeds off.
Lor: Reason #1846957 you should not be friends with Nancy Drew. Or at the very least, DO NOT go on vacation with or around this bitch.
Sweeney: Truth.
Nancy kneels by Kim’s side and Kim says, “It was Rosita,” before she passes out, which is how she will remain for the bulk of the book. (Lor: COMA.) Nancy notices a guy on the edge of the crowd that gathers to see what happened. As soon as the cops show up, though, that crowd vanishes. The cop explains that those people were probably all illegal and didn’t want to get caught, and that this kind of thing happens all the time around there.
Lor: Fuck you, Ghostwriting Collective.
Sweeney: The couple pages of random crap about “illegals” continues into Nancy’s attempt to break into Kim’s room for clues. (Kim being taken to the hospital and the hypothetical police investigation are given a total of about two sentences, because obviously the sleuthing of an eighteen year old is far more important stuff.)
Nancy is delayed by the first of many nondescript buff, tan, blonde guys we meet in this story, known only by his assumed job title, in this case, “Maintenance Man.” When Nancy finally gets in, the case has clearly been torn apart by Maintenance Man. Nancy looks for clues and by an act of contrivance stumbles upon a photobooth strip of Kim and a pretty Hispanic girl, who Nancy decides must be Rosita.
Note: If you’re new to the Nancy Drew Files, you should just know that everything Nancy assumes is wrong.
Lor: Truth. It’s actually quite catching, though. Please also assume that everything I guess is also wrong: ROSITA DID IT.
Sweeney: Then someone is coming and Nancy has to hide in the closet. A guy pokes his head around, and Nancy sees that it’s the same one she spotted on the edge of the crowd of people. He throws some clothes from the floor into a bag and then leaves.
Nancy tries to catch up to him, but fails. She eventually rejoins the Bovine Besties at the beach where she left them. This is where we meet the next non-descript buff, tan, blonde guy, Dirk. He works for a woman who runs a boat that takes money-dropping tourists out to this random island where they go and party it up for a few hours and before the boat returns to take them back to mainland.
Bess, whose taste in men is itself something of a tell in these books is all over Dirk, and he appears interested. As soon as Nancy starts to explain what happened to Kim, however, he drops her and becomes super interested in Nancy. He tells her that if she agrees to meet with him the next day and tells him everything she knows, he might be able to help her. Nancy reluctantly agrees.
Lor: DIRK DID IT.
Sweeney: Then she’s wandering around the beach and she sees the guy from the crowd / Kim’s room, and he’s a lifeguard there. Nancy strikes up a conversation with him, some shit about his Hispanic accent, and then she outright accuses him of being at the scene of the accident, at which point he stops being friendly. Then Nancy steps on a jellyfish and some kid helps her and then yells back at the lifeguard for not warning her, and we learn that the lifeguard’s name is Ricardo. Also, apparently, this means that Ricardo was trying to kill her.
Lor: Most creative killer ever? “I placed this jellyfish here strategically.” RICARDO DID IT.
Sweeney: Nancy finds the Bovine Besties again and they take her to the ER where it turns out that she’s going to be fine and then they go to Kim’s room and her mom is there because she just flew in after the accident and blah blah blah, Nancy explains to Bess that she’s about to steal her new buff boyfriend even though Nancy’s got Ned back at home in whereverthehellshe’sfrom.
Nancy goes windsurfing with Dirk, but her sail breaks and almost kills her. She realizes after the fact that the sail had been sawed down and her near death incident was obviously planned. Then a speedboat pulls up and it turns out to be Lila Templeton, Dirk’s boss. Lila takes Nancy back to shore and because she had seen Ricardo again right before she and Dirk set off, she becomes absolutely certain that Ricardo tried to kill her again.
Remember what I said about Nancy’s inaccuracy, right? Obviously because she saw Ricardo that day he tried to kill her (again). Around this time I start really missing the stupidity of eighth grader’s internal monologues, because this bitch is driving me nuts.
More shit happens that I’ve blocked out because it’s uninteresting and unimportant and eventually Nancy tracks down the girl from the pictures, and sees her with Ricardo. They run, and she only catches up to the girl who turns out to be named Maria, not Rosita. Maria says she’ll explain, but her English is poor.
Lor: I hate you right now, Ghostwriting Collective. MARIA? REALLY. MARIA?
Sweeney: Nancy assures Maria that she “speaks her language,” and I accept that I can’t throat-punch a fictional character, no matter how condescending she is. Maria then talks about a boat that smuggles people into the US and then exploits their poverty and fear of immigration officials to force them into slave labor at farms in Florida. It’s then that I realize how weirdly political this book is for a Nancy Drew Files mystery.
Nancy gets hit in the head with something and wakes up tied to the end of the dock, with her head below the water line as the tide is starting to come in. Eventually, though, she gets her feet loose and shimmies up the poll and somehow gets her hands free the same way and crawls up the dock and collapses.
When she sees that her hands had been bound by the sash from her dress, she declares this an “extra-evil” addition – instead, of you know, just being resourceful because who the fuck carries around rope? Whatever. Anyway, sometime shortly thereafter a body washes to shore and it’s Ricardo, which means that Nancy was, as usual, wrong.
Lor: THE OCEAN DID IT.
Sweeney: That’s probably the most accurate theory yet! But no, Nancy is about to figure it all out: she remembers Dirk telling her that Lila Templeton’s family was super rich from owning most of the orange and sugar cane farms in Florida and I forget how we make this connection to Maria’s story, but basically Nancy realizes that the party boat is a front. She takes the partiers to the island, goes to pick up people to smuggle into the country from somewhere that is never mentioned in this book, retrieves partiers, returns to shore.
Nancy and the Bovine Besties put on stupid disguises and go on the next party cruise (somewhere in there Nancy had considered calling the cops but then just like forgot about it or something because having someone try to kill you is so NBD).
They split up, but get caught quickly anyway. Lila forces Nancy, with a gun, to a room in the bottom of the boat and locks the door. The Bovine Besties, Maria, and Kim are all down there. (Kim woke up and was basically kidnapped from the hospital. This fact is mentioned to us about as tangentially as I am doing it now.)
Lor: Worst timing ever, Kim. I’ve been trying to tell these Traumahood characters: when in doubt, stay in a coma.
Sweeney: Excellent advice. They never take our excellent advice, though, do they?
Eventually Dirk shows up with a gun. Bess distracts him and Nancy manages to knock him out. She leaves the gun with her friends and goes to do recon and figure out their escape. She swims to shore and then creates a diversion with the tourists and screaming about a shark or some shit. She tries to steal a speedboat, but Lila sees her. Nancy runs back into the center of the island which makes no damn sense until we see the contrivance light bulb turn on: she is chased by Maintenance Man (all the nondescript, buff, blondes worked for Lila) and then Dirk shows up and knocks him out instead of Nancy.
As it turns out, Dirk is an undercover cop! THERE IS A REAL LEGIT POLICE OFFICER IN THIS BOOK, GUYS! Crazy stuff!
Lor: Nancy knocked him out with his own gun though. We had no one better? No one? No one? No one?
Sweeney: They do a quick catch-up on what happened to both sides since Nancy knocked him out. Then they hop in a speedboat and have the most surprisingly dull boat chase scene ever, that ends with Nancy jumping the boat over a sandbar.
They get to shore and call the cops. Kim goes back to the hospital and Kim’s mother somehow miraculously is able to help Maria get a green card so that she won’t be deported for testifying. Dirk thanks Nancy for being such a stellar detective and then kisses her and Nancy doesn’t really seem to recall that she has a boyfriend or anything. The end.
No seriously, that’s it. That last paragraph is handled in about a page. I never thought it would be possible that babysitting stories and detailed descriptions of meetings conducted by babies could be interesting, but Carolyn Keene somehow managed to make a book with a murder and a boat chase scene mind-numbingly boring.
Also, I forgot to keep track of all the times we talked about “the illegals,” but each and every time they are brought up in the book, they are described as such.
Lor: But, wait, the white people did it though, right? Is that racist? Crap.
Sweeney: I know, I thought about that too. I’m going to say yes, though, because other than Maria’s little speech and Ricardo’s whole dying thing, white people did everything in this story.
I am impressed that there is an actual law enforcement officer trying to his job in this book. Nancy basically got in his way and created problems for his investigation, because she’s a fucking teenager and I guess she didn’t know that Florida is the only place in the country where there are real cops instead of kiddie detectives.
Lor: Final Score:
+1 Florida for having at least one cop on a case
+10 illegals for not doing illegal shit, other than, you know, being illegal
-10 Nancy for making murder BORING.
-100 Ghostwriting Collective, you racist MFs.
+1,000,000 Lorraine for getting someone else to read a Nancy Drew book.
Next time on The Nancy Drew Files: Someone tells Nancy they are going to kill her on vacation, and she still goes on vacation. Find out if someone kills her in #6 – White Water Terror.
Nicole is the co-captain of Snark Squad and these days she spends most of her time editing podcasts. She spends too much time on Twitter and very occasionally vlogs and blogs. In her day job she's a producer, editor, director, and sometimes host of educational YouTube channels. She loves travel, maps, panda gifs, and semicolons. Writing biographies stresses her out; she crowd sourced this one years ago and has been using a version of it ever since. She would like to thank Twitter for their help.
I'm a 30-something south Floridan who loves the beach but cannot swim. Such is my life, full of small contradictions and little trivialities. My main life goals are never to take life too seriously, but to do everything I attempt seriously well. After that, my life goals devolve into things like not wearing pants and eating all of the Zebra Cakes in the world. THE WORLD.
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