Nancy Drew Diaries - Mystery of the midnight rider - Book review

Welcome to my review of Nancy Drew Diaries #3, Mystery of the Midnight Rider, first published on May 7, 2013. The book begins with Nancy and her friends at the local fairgounds. Nancy and her boyfriend Ned are celebrating their anniversary this weekend--81 years and counting!--so he decided to take her to the annual River Heights Horse Show. While he's there, Ned's parents want him to meet with a family friend, Payton Evans. Petyon is a rising star in the horse show community, and she's entering a number of competitions, including the Grand Prix. This is a big deal, because the Olympic chef de équipe...équipe...chef de équi... This is a big deal, because a talent scout from the United States Olympic Team is going to watch. If Payton wins, she's going to the Olympics! One of the other riders, a girl named Jessica, cuts Payton off and yells at her for talking to people in the warm-up ring. Jessica, you just earned yourself a spot on the _suspect list_. An extremely intense woman named Dana Kinney arrives. Dana is Payton's trainer, and she has bad news. Payton's star horse has been accused of using performance-enhancing drugs! But Midnight would never use steroids! Payton is called to the ring, where she competes in a jumping competition. Payton has a clear round, much to the displeasure of an older competitor, Cal Kidd. Cal, welcome to the _suspect list_. Dana the Trainer is also displeased with Payton's performance, and she chews Payton out in front of a large crowd. Sorry, Dana, but that's _suspect list_ material. After the event, Payton takes her horse out for some grazing. She gets a call from her father, who dumps more pressure on her. Suddenly, someone throws a tomato at Midnight, which startles the horse and almost causes him to run away. Nancy looks around for the tomato-thrower, and she sees a crazy animal rights activist named Annie Molina. Annie is added to the _suspect list_. After this, Payton performs in a jumping competition, and we get two more suspects: Mickey the elderly groom and Lenny Hood, a trash-talking trainer. It's official. Nancy has a full suspect list. But you know what she _doesn't_ have? An actual mystery to solve. Let's fix that situation, shall we? That night, there is a barbecue at Ned's house. To everyone's surprise, Payton finds a threatning note. Well, not to my surprise. At the time of my saying this, EVERY book in the Nancy Drew Diaries series has started things off with a threatening message. Come on, Ghost Writer. You can do better than that. Ned, you can do better than that, too. After all, you're celebrating your anniversary with Nancy, by spending the entire weekend with another girl. That is a bad boyfriend move. Actually, it turns out that Ned isn't a horrible boyfriend. He put a lot of effort into planning a romantic getaway for him and Nancy; the horse show was just a cover story so he could surprise her. Sadly, now that Nancy has a case to solve, she can't go out on the surprise date. It's also sad, because this is a bigger surprise than the book's twist ending. You CAN solve the mystery, right now, if you think about it. The threatening note was found at Ned's barbecue, so the culprit must be... Here's a hint: It's not Nancy. The next day, Nancy decides to investigate everyone on the suspect list. Why? I dunno. None of them were at the barbecue, so they're all innocent. Nancy tries to talk with Dana the Trainer, but they are interrupted by bad news: Midnight just failed his drug test. They found theobromine in his system. Theobromine is the caffiene-like chemical that is found in chocoate. The amount in Midnight's system is borderline, so they're going to do further testing to see if he's over the legal limit. Nancy's friends arrive, and they all search for Payton. In the stabling area, they discover that Payton's brand new saddle has been torn to pieces by a knife. Since Payton got the saddle after winning a big class at Devon, Nancy immediately suspects that Jessica destroyed it in a fit of jealousy. It turns out Nancy's wrong. Some nearby girls explain that Jessica wasn't in that competition, because she never does eq classes. Wait, Jessica never does equitation? What the eq, Jessica? Next, Nancy turns her investigation on Cal Kidd. The Internet says that Cal used to be a hotshot on the riding scene, until he started gambling. He lost everything, and he had to sell all of his horses, including Midnight. The investigation gets a little derailed at this point, as Nancy just wanders around randomly. Some horses get loose, Jessica spreads rumors about the horse on steroids, and Payton argues with Dana. Payton doesn't want to compete this weekend; she wants to go to an out-of-state wedding instead. Nancy resumes the investigation by talking to Mickey the Groom. Mickey explains that if a horse is caught using illegal drugs, the horse's trainer, AKA Dana, would be suspended. Mickey thinks a suspension would probably be a good thing at this point; Midnight has been working so hard that he needs a break. Nancy and her friends split up at this point, in order to chase after dead ends. Bess learns that Lenny Hood has a cell phone, and Nancy learns that Cal Kidd is a jerk. George wins the investigation by proving Jessica's innocence; the Internet says Jessica was nowhere near the random drug screening that caught Midnight. Thank you, Twitter! Ned arrives and takes Nancy to dinner at an Italian restaurant. The date is cut short, when Payton sends Nancy a text. Someone at the show is stalking her! Nancy and Ned rush over to the fairgrounds, where they find Payton safe and sound, with nobody in sight except Mickey. Payton has good news: Midnight successfully passed his drug test, so he can compete tomorrow. Payton also talks about Cal Kidd. Cal has a major grudge against Dana for unknown reasons, and Nancy decides this is the final clue. Cal is the culprit! He feed chocolate to Midnight, so Midnight would flunk the drug test and Dana would be fired! It's a nice thory, but there's a problem. Payton is self-registered as her own trainer. That means _she_ gets suspended for flunking the drug test, not Dana. The next day, Nancy gets a phone call from Annie Molina, the animal rights activist that everyone forgot about. Annie confesses that she is an extremely unimportant character, so she wants to do the honorable thing and take herself off _the suspect list_. Okay, not really. Annie confesses that the animal rights activists threw the tomato at Midnight and let the horses loose earier, but that's it. Nancy and her friends return to the barn, where Dana and Cal Kidd are having an exposition argument. The two of them are half-brother and half-sister; he's mad because she refuses to work as his trainer. Nancy decides to take both of them off _the suspect list_. Nancy is now bummed, because she's out of suspects, and she still hasn't solved the case. Just before the Grand Prix starts, Nancy goes to the barn to talk with Payton. Payton has chocolate bars right near Midnight, and she is found holding an open knife, above her saddle. As Nancy deduces, this is clearly not suspicious behavior. The competition begins, and Nancy thinks things over. She finally realizes what everyone realized at the beginning: namely, all of her suspects are innocent, because none of them were at the barbecue where the threatening note was found. On the field, Payton refuses to let Dana check the horse's girth, which is the equestrian equilvalent of tightening your seatbelt. After talking to Payton's parents, something clicks in Nancy's mind, and she finally solves the mystery. Nancy runs down from the stands and jumps into the ring like a crazy person. She stops Payton from competing, and she reveals that Payton's girth was cut. If Midnight had jumped, she would have fallen off and been injured. Payton confesses that she is the culprit. She can't handle the pressure of constantly competing in horse shows, so she sabotaged herself, in hopes that her parents would force her to quit. The book ends with Payton arriving at Nancy's house. They talk about what will happen next in her life, and Payton drives Nancy to a surprise location, where Ned is waiting for her with a horse-drawn carriage. Happy anniversary, you two! THE END. Post-Book Followup. This book is fair to average. There's nothing about this book which really stands out, either good or bad. It's the literary equivalent of popcorn; sure, it will fill you up for a while, but there's not much taste to it. Just like the first two books in the series, this book suffers from character overload. The book is too short for Nancy to investigate all of the suspects, so what happens is that some of the suspects completely drop off the face of the Earth. In particular, Annie only shows up for two pages before her plotline gets wrapped up, Lennie Hood is completely overlooked the entire time, and Nancy decides to stop investigating Mickey partway through, without any real reason. With the first two books, I was somewhat willing to overlook because the characters were interesting, but here, they're...well, not as interesting. Also like the first two books in the series, Nancy reviews the case a bit too often, and it can feel like all she does is recap information the reader already knows. Other reviewers say that this makes Nancy come across as detached from the case. Another flaw, which I already pointed out, is that Nancy's entire investigation is a waste of time. None of the suspects could have left the threatening note at Ned's barbecue. Nancy's investigation should have started and finished there, but instead, she spends all of her time investigating unrelated people who were miles away at the time the note was planted. What do I like about this book? There's some clever wordplay at the end, and the surprises with Ned were fine. Actually, the entire barbecue scene with Ned's family was pretty good. Overall, I give this book the average score: 5 out of 10. As always, I'm taking a point off the score, because the book is double-spaced to make it seem twice as long as it really is. It's really bad when your book doesn't have enough room to develop half of the characters, because half of the book is taken up by empty space. Final score: 4 out of 10.