Nancy Drew, Move Over

Move over, Nancy Drew-Emmy Budd's here, to give you a run for your money, in another excellent mystery, the third one in Jean Blasiar's Emmy Budd Mystery series, She's again joined by her best friend, T.J. Blake, and his new pet, a scruffy stray dog he names Harry, because it looks to him like his Uncle Harry. There's excitement in the air right from the very first page of this mystery, with the tweens sitting in Jerry's Malt Shop discussing a gruesome find unearthed on the property of a local farmer in Jerseyville, Hank Turner: a human hand. Who does it belong to? How did it get there? And why is the land so important that land developer Andrew McDonald would go to any lengths to put up a tavern on the part of the Turner farm he bought from the bank, when Mr. Turner couldn't make a payment on time?T.J. first sees Harry next to a statue of a man and his dog outside of the town's library, and he thinks Harry looks a lot like the statue of the dog. He gets Harry to follow him
by tossing the dog peanuts to eat, as T.J. rides his bicycle. Harry catches every one of them in his mouth. The dog makes appearances at key moments in the entertaining novel, and Mr. McDonald makes comments here and there about a dog who used to live on the land he bought. It made me wonder exactly what the relationship was, if any, between Harry and the dog McDonald speaks about, and it made me want to keep reading to learn more.It's summertime, and besides the usual summer fun of going to movies and riding bikes, Emmy and T.J. think about getting part-time jobs to earn some spending cash. When McDonald offers them both a job, they accept, though Emmy is reluctant, not liking Mr. McDonald's surface kindness and fake Southern accent that gets more pronounced as he gets madder or stressed. She believes his kindness is a cover, to get the townspeople on his side so they'll agree to his plans. Still, he says he'll pay them well for their work, so she agrees, thinking that he'l
l have them weeding his newly-purchased farmland.Mr. McDonald, however, has other ideas. He talks down to the kids, calling them "young'uns," and has Emmy making lemonade for his hired hands. T.J is asked to run errands for whatever Emmy might need, like going into town to buy more lemons, when Emmy learns she has only two available. When Emmy's lemonade turns out to be too sour, and she's ran out of sugar, she substitutes what she believes to be honey she finds in a cabinet. The "honey," seems to pour too easily, but everyone comments about how good the lemonade tastes, including T.J. Little does Emmy realize, until T.J. starts acting strangely, and the hired hands start getting loud and begin fighting, that it wasn't honey she added, but something alcoholic. She doesn't like her role in the whole thing, but feels like she and T.J. were used by McDonald, like he seems to use everyone. They decide to quit working for Mr. McDonald, and T.J.'s mom, who works at a diner, lets t
hem help her there to earn some spending money.The mystery deepens when Emmy overhears a couple of McDonald's workers talking about either a person or a place called "Brawley." Emmy is sure that the name has something important to do with why Mr. McDonald is so interested in building a tavern on the old Turner land, whose bones were found there, and why Mr. McDonald refuses to sell it to the father of another friend of hers, who tells McDonald he'll pay double the price McDonald did, and that he wants to make a cemetery there. But, how will she find out what Brawley means, without alerting McDonald that she's closing in on learning what he's up to?The Real Dog is Harry is an exciting, suspenseful novel about Emmy Budd's and her friend, T.J. Blake's, involvement in what might be their most challenging case yet! The first two novels in the series by Jean Blasiar are Emmy Budd and the Hijacked Train and Emmy Budd Vol. 2 - Don't Look Now. They're also great, so I recommend you r
ead them, too, but the good news is that you don't have to have read them to understand what's happening in and enjoy the third book, The Real Dog is Harry. If you're into cool, fun, and suspenseful mysteries, then I'd highly recommend this book and the rest of the novels in the Emmy Budd Mystery series to you!

View this post on my blog: http://www.yourgamebook.com/nancy-drew-move-over.html