I've been talking up the books of M. V. Carey for a while now, because her writing was a clear step up for the series in a few ways. 'The Mystery of the Flaming Footprints' did a number of things for the first time that it should have been doing all along. Her prose was rich and looked all the more impressive for that book being surrounded by Nick West's two lesser entries. 'The Mystery of the Singing Serpent' was an excellent novel that firmly reminded how she was pulling the series up by its bootstraps.

Well, after a couple of decent William Arden contributions, Carey is back with her third book and it turns out to be more of a mixed bag. There's a lot of good here but it's not as consistently good as her first two. I didn't remember the twist from my childhood but it was easy to figure out. It was a likelihood by the thirty-page mark and a pretty solid guarantee by sixty. It would have been more substantial had a particular deception not relied on some notably weak arguments. I failed to buy into any of them from moment one and I'm not even a member of the Three Investigators.

The setup is good. The boys are on their way to Sky Village, a ski resort in the Sierra Nevadas, with Hans and Konrad. It's very new and very fake, but their cousin, Anna Schmid, owns the Slalom Inn and they haven't seen each other since they were all kids back home in Bavaria. When Uncle Titus and Aunt Matilda closed their junk yard for two weeks to take a holiday, they saw it as a fantastic opportunity to drive up and surprise her with a visit.

They absolutely surprise her but then she surprises them in return. She's just got married, only a week earlier, to a gentleman named Joe Havemeyer, who seems suspicious right off the bat. Anna doesn't seem quite right either, not as pleased to see her cousins as they might have expected and adamant about speaking English in front of her husband. What's more, they weren't there when the truck arrived but the door was open, so they walked in and found that Anna's office had been ransacked. Her explanation was that they did it themselves, while searching for a lost key.

So Hans and Konrad hire the Three Investigators to look into Mr. Havemeyer. They believe that he's going to fritter away all Anna's money and then take off but they can't raise that to her without an element of proof. Anna also enlists their help, in trying to find the missing key, which is to a safety deposit box where she keeps all her cash. She has no bank account and can't pay bills until she can get back into that box. The only people who don't hire the boys are the two guests already staying at the inn, Mr. Jensen and Mr. Smathers. Jensen is a photographer, specialising in animal pictures. Smathers is a vegetarian and an angry one at that.

This isn't a particularly deep mystery and there's less danger than usual. Sure, there's a bear who likes to rummage through the dustbins and someone has a habit of rabbit punching people at the least opportunity and then sweeping away their footprints before they can be identified, but a lot of this one is spent either inside the Slalom Inn or wandering about asking questions without lots of people trying to kidnap them. Oh, and Slalom Inn backs onto Mount Lofty, colloquially known as Monster Mountain because, well, people have seen a monster high up on its slopes.

In fact, it's such a shallow mystery that I can't really say much more about it without traipsing into spoiler territory. Mostly I can just ask questions. Who's rabbit punching people and covering their tracks, for a start? Why does Mr. Havemeyer have a tranquiliser gun that he doesn't seem to be at all dangerous with? Why is he so set on building a swimming pool that doesn't have a shallow end, other than to give Hans and Konrad something to do while they're hanging out at the inn, devout workers that they are. What might Jensen and Smathers be hiding? And, of course, is there really a monster on Monster Mountain?

Fortunately, Carey's prose remains strong so this is a highly enjoyable read, even if it isn't much of a mystery, there isn't much danger and there isn't much of a supernatural element. Now, there is a supernatural element that I don't want to talk about other than to say that it's rather unique in this series because it's actually real. Usually, there's a rational explanation for every supernatural element and the boys are the ones who figure it out. Here, they figure out that there isn't one, an unusual path for Carey to take and one that doesn't work for me because it inherently shifts it all into a different category. Suddenly it isn't straightforward mystery anymore, now it's fantasy.

I'd therefore call this enjoyable but Carey's weakest contribution thus far. Fortunately, she has an opportunity to rectify that because she'd write three of the next four books, including 'The Secret of the Haunted Mirror', which is up next and, as long as my memory isn't faulty, returns the series from fantasy to mystery where it belongs. I don't remember the second twenty as well as the first and many of those are blurred, so I can't be sure that there isn't another example of this later on but, if there is, I don't remember it. I guess that will become one of my checks going forward. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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