Review Detail

Secret Spies Ad-DRESS a Mystery
Overall rating
 
4.0
Plot
 
4.0
Characters
 
4.0
Writing Style
 
4.0
Illustrations/Photos (if applicable)
 
4.0
After finding out about the women who have formed the Secret Spy Society, Peggy, Rita and Dot get drawn into another mystery. A dress has gone missing from the Fashion Twins shop. They create fabulous garments for Josephine Baker, and want to know who has run roughshod over their shop and stolen one of their best creation. The girls investigate, and find a huge mess, as well as jelly doughnut filling spread about. They follow a trail of glitter to a house, and come the next day to find a group of scouts working busily. They are tending the yard and painting the house, but the girls need more information. With help from spy Virginia Hall, they get costumes and infiltrate the group, claiming to be transfer scouts. They uncover a slightly sinister plan to get children to chores under the guise of serving as scouts. Will they be able to prove that the woman doing this has bad intentions, and that she stole the dress?
Good Points
This is a cute mystery with lots of girl power and some historical connections. The back of the book has thumbnail biographies of the women spies mentioned, and some appear in the book in various roles. In addition to Hall and Baker, one of the teacher is based on Noor Inayat Khan, and several others help at various points. While these women lived at different times, it's fun to think of them all working together. This had a bit of a feel of the Australian television program, Ms Fisher's Modern Murder Mysteries, but with slightly more benign crimes.

The pink and black illustrations are on most pages, and some of the text is in white on black pages, so the book is very striking. There are lots of depictions of the fun costumes they wear, as well as all of the goings on in the "scouts" house. The villain is caught in a satisfactory way and learns her lesson.

Peggy, Rita, and Dot are all bold and fearless girls. Theyare always together, so I struggled to tell them apart, but they all had different personalities, as well as vaguely different ethnicities.

It's hard to find a short mystery book for early middle grade readers. This is a bit longer than Butler's Kayla and King mysteries, but would be a good choice for readers who enjoyed the similarly illustrated and classic Basil of Baker Street by Eve Titus or Sobol's Encyclopdeia Brown mysteries.
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