Sabotage at Sports City
ISBN: 9780671730628
Description
When someone threatens to bring about the deaths of fifty-three people at the upcoming summer Olympics, Frank and Joe Hardy go undercover to protect the athletes from the unknown killer.
Reviewed on 11th January 2025
In one of their weirdest adventures yet, the Hardy Boys visit the Olympic Games, where Chet’s cousin is both competing and under threat.
It’s 1992, and there is an Olympic Games to tie-in to (I also remember from my youth the 1996 Olympics tie-in Hardy Boys novel, but it will be years before I get back to that!). The real Olympics is in Barcelona, but clearly that’s no good for the Hardy Boys - so their version is in an unnamed city that’s far from home but not far enough to be outside America. That’s just a bizarre way to ignore the actual world which makes so little sense to me as an adult reader.
Beyond that though it’s a fairly classic story for the era, with a mix of violence, investigation, and coincidence, and one of the classic tropes of mystery fiction thrown in to wrap it up.