The Magazine for Youth with LGBT Parents

Grown-Ups

Book Review: The Case of the Vanishing Valuables by Nancy Garden

by Hannah Crawford

It starts off innocently enough. A salt shaker goes missing, but someone might have just misplaced it. Then other things start disappearing—things that can’t be explained away so easily. When their favorite pictures get stolen right out of their rooms, Nikki and Travis know that it’s time to start investigating.

This book is the sequel to the first in the series, The Case of the Stolen Scarab (check out the review here). In the last book, Nikki, Travis, and their two moms moved to the Candlestone Inn, and the kids solved a mystery and helped catch a thief. Now they have a whole new set of people at their inn, which makes figuring out who stole the valuables even harder. Could it be Lexie, the inn’s clumsy new maid? Could it be Mr. Corrigan, a suspicious antiques dealer? Or could it even be a ghost?

If you liked the first book in the series, you will like this one too. You can read this one without having read the first one, though, and you’ll still be able to figure out what’s going on. However, this book is a little scarier. Nikki and Travis investigate a suicide that happened a long time in the past, but might be linked to their mystery. And there are some creepy noises and happenings at the inn that they think could only be a ghost. So be prepared to be a little spooked if you try reading this book at night!

The Case of the Vanishing Valuables, by Nancy Garden, is published by Two Lives Publishing and is available at their website, www.twolives.com.

Author

Staff Writer Hannah Crawford graduated from Carleton College with a major in English and a concentration in Latin American Studies. Apart from reading, her great love is theater, which is one of the many reasons she is very excited to have recently moved to Minneapolis.