I have small stacks of books, tucked in different places around my house waiting to be read, that I've picked up at antique stores or used books stores. This one I found a few months ago at an antique shop and finally got to it after a few weeks recovering from surgery. Though it is the second in a series, I expected it to be relatively stand-alone, as this type generally are. A few too many references to the first and I had to set it aside for a few days while I sought the first to fill in the gaps. Typical Hardy Boys style boy adventures, as I noted on the first book, the authors (husband and wife team writing as Campbell) were a little ambiguous with the ages of the two main characters - supposedly high school aged, but not coming off that way, particularly when pugilism inserted itself. The premise of this one was a little stretched. A twenty year old controversial legal case that was supposed to be famous but takes place in boondocks Colorado? And the setting and story screamed anachronism, like missed the right time period by 40 years. Still, the pace was decent, the unfolded plot engaging enough until the erstwhile and mostly sharp detectives suddenly got pretty clueless. And I can't help but think the Scooby Do writers were familiar ("If it wasn't for those pesky kids...!") with this style of adolescent fare from the 1940s-60s. ( )

A 1950s book of the Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys genre. Energetic characters out to solve an old mystery. Action scenes and close calls along with some serious thought to discover what the mystery is and who was involved. ( )

I like this book very much. ( )

I read this nearly forty years ago, as a kid, and now I just got a very nice edition to read again.

I remember preferring the Ken Holt series to the later Hardy Boys books, for an obvious reason, I see now: there is style in the writing, here. The frontispiece artwork has a classic tagline: "The floor gave way beneath them, and they plunged into the darkness below." This has echoed in my head for years. By the standards of popular fiction, this is classic writing.

Even the first sentence of this kids' novel is better written than most books written after the 1950s for the youth market:

"The sleek new red convertible, its top down, purred smoothly over the crest of the long hill and dipped its hood for the descent."

I suspect I may actually enjoy reading this book again. ( )