9th September 2023

Hardy Boys 109 sees the brothers back at the local TV studio as Frank takes part in a local inter-school quiz show. Until of course the host doesn’t show up, and the brothers enter detective mode.

It’s a nicely different pace, with some guest characters that shake things up, and although they are frustrating in places to read about, they do add a unique comedic edge to proceedings.

A good entry in the series for this era, which I found flowed quite smoothly.

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5th August 2023

For their 108th mystery, the Hardy Boys find themselves working undercover at the local hot-rod show, as monster trucks fly around them.

As a mystery, it’s a good one with an interesting and dangerous setting, and a wide variety of characters to suspect and investigate. There’s a lot going on.

This one lacks all but one of the clichés of the series in this era, and that one that remains feels unfortunate because it just feels like picking on someone. I’m torn between whether a lack of recurring stuff makes this a better book, or is disappointing.

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6th May 2023

The Hardys and Chet barely break a sweat when their friend/girlfriend/sister Iola is kidnapped in Florida. This is probably the most glaring plot hole in this novel, in which the only people to go looking for a missing teenager are three other teenagers, with all their parents just carrying on with their lives.

Beyond that, it’s the usual tale of near-misses, breaking and entering to look for clues, and eventually finding the coincidences that tie everything together. Pretty standard on that front from this era of Hardy Boys books.

Reasonably well paced though and with a good variety of characters and clues, and although Iola isn’t visible, she clearly has some level of agency throughout which is more than sometimes (although that hardly makes up for the incredibly low amount for any other female character).

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31st December 2022

The Hardys and Chet spend book 106 in New York, where Joe is playing in an early esports championship - until someone starts stealing all the game cartridges.

It’s actually a delightfully retro story in retrospect, inspiring nostalgia for the early 90s, but at the time would have been the height of modernity.

The story suffers from reverting to some older tropes though - I don’t think there was a single female character in the entire book.

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31st December 2022

For story 105 the Hardy brothers sign up to be volunteer fire-fighters, which despite this being a book from 1990 still feels like an archaic way to run your fire service.

While the plot works, the characters seem to have become a lot more willing to break a lot of laws in their investigations - this in particular is full of things which would not hold up in court as legitimate crime-fighting activity.

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31st December 2022

The Hardys and their friend Chet visit New York in book 104 to see a famous magician, but more than just glamorous assistants start to disappear.

It’s a more traditional story, but continues the new 1990s characterisation of Joe as a hot-head. The plot feels a bit convoluted at the end, but possibly I was just very tired when reading it.

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31st December 2022

The Hardy brothers are once again on their summer holidays (the last few books have leapt around the seasons, almost as if they’re targeting release in different school holidays) and find themselves in San Francisco, where a horse has been stolen.

There’s a string of coincidences, but the boys do manage some investigating - they’ve become much less concerned about breaking the law during their investigations though. I’m not sure how I feel about how far they go this time.

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