The Living Portrait

Another Judy Bolton Mystery from after her wedding to Peter and with Roberta living with them in their house The Living Portrait is an enjoyable read despite having a few confusing elements within it.
Judy's husband is an FBI agent and the premise is that now that he is an FBI field agent Judy will be involved in bigger cases.

The mystery in this book revolves around a portrait hanging in Judy's lounge which she bought. Horace had informed Judy that the last owner had sold it as they said it brought bad luck and that they had received phone calls telling her she should get rid of it. There were also prowlers hanging around gone house of the previous owner. This story was enough to intrigue Judy to purchase the artwork and of course mystery came with the portrait.
As I have not been reading the Judy Bolton books in order I find Roberta's age confusing. I'm not sure what age Roberta is meant to be but sometimes she says things that seem to old for the age group I am thinking she is meant to be within.

Miscommunication between Judy and Roberta becomes a part of the storyline and delays the process of understanding important elements in the mystery. Overall the mystery is a good one but is a bit predictable in regards to the painting and makes you wonder why it took Judy so long to consider it as an option especially since Judy is always described as having great intuition and is logically minded.

Judy Bolton The Secret of the musical tree

This is book 19 from the Judy Bolton series and is set at Christmas time.

Since Applewood have republished The Judy Bolton Series recently and these are available through the book depository it makes choosing which Judy Bolton book to read easier as I am no longer limited by what I can find on ebay at a reasonable price. For Christmas 2012 I decided I wanted to read a Christmas based story so I chose Judy Bolton and The Secret of the Musical Tree.

The story is set shortly before Christmas and Judy and Peter are married. Peter is an FBI Agent. They have a young girl living with them called Roberta.

Judy goes Christmas shopping to prepare for the upcoming festive Christmas lunch where she is having family over including her cousin Roxy Zoller.

Whilst shopping Judy is mistaken for her cousin Roxy. She is told by a Store Clerk of a present she bought the day before and she was told by a friend of Roxy's that Roxy and her father were in a plane accident. The friend that talks to Judy about this is trying to find Roxy to talk to her about a missing emerald.

Judy in talking to Roxy learns that something is wrong and her first big clue comes in the form of the present that Roxy sent which says to open before December 23rd.

Roxy and Judy change places and we learn that Roxy was being held captive by crooks trying to find out where the missing emerald is.

The mystery had is ups and downs. That said I did actually continue to read it with interest to the very end.

Some things did bother me. Judy decides to sneak around the house in Roxy's high heels instead of choosing her rubber soled shoes. This seriously leaves you wondering why Judy would make such a stupid mistake. Secondly just as soon as Judy takes Roxy's place she decides to try and escape the place though I thought she was suppose to be there because they had threatened to hurt Roxy's father if Roxy tried to escape so Judy and Roxy traded places. Also what cousins are identical? I think someone in that family has some explaining to do, you can't get close to identical out of cousins. Anyway in the end all is right for Christmas day which is just what you want in a Christmas mystery.

The Yellow Phantom

I had to put this book down half way through when my Beverly Gray's Return book arrived. That's not to say this is a bad book, just that I love Beverly Gray books.

Judy is on holidays in New York in this book.

Is it a recurring theme that all of Judy's friends have lost relatives?

One of the interesting aspects of this story is that Judy is working for a book publisher and for a girl with no experience in the area she seems well qualified to criticise budding writers for poor scripts and rewrites poems for a famous writer. This technique makes you think the criticism is coming from the author herself and not from Judy.

This book has a romantic element to it not only for Irene but we can also see what leads Judy to choose Peter over Arthur.

The end of the story leads into the next book in the series and indicates to the reader that the next book is also going to be featuring Irene.

I must say this is one book from what I have read from the series so far where I have not had to question Judy as a heroine of the story. In this book Judy shows more warmth and respect towards her friends (in this case Irene) that I remember previously.

A good mystery though I found the end of the story took a fair amount of time to explain what had happened rather than the mystery unraverlling through natural discovery.

The Haunted Attic Book Review

Here is your popular teen detective at a new school and not fitting in well at all.

Judy rather than taking the popular behaviour route instead decides to speak her mind.

The jealousy of Lorraine is played up as she doesn't like Judy (obviously due to the fact that Arthur is interested in Judy, this was indicated in the first book and continued here in the second)

The mystery itself, it's hard not to enjoy the old haunted house aspect that mystery books love to use.

This I thought was done well. Not the stock standard.

One thing that Margaret Sutton is good at is making you take sides, must say I didn't even like Lois that much for a while.

Interesting to note that Peter is the knight in shining armour and turns up to console Judy just when she needs it.

The book contains more than one mystery (some are loosely called mysteries, more "discoveries" really. The idea that there is more to learn though does keep you interested, similar to the way the Kay Tracey Mansion of Secrets kept me interested because there were more treasures to uncover. 

The Voice in the Suitcase

There were love hate aspects to this book. The more I thought about it though the more I thought the book did reflect well the teenage dramatisation within friendships.

I enjoyed the start (a school outing), I liked the fact that I never guessed what the voice in the suitcase was (considering so many teen books are so predictable)

I thought the stay on the farm dragged on a bit. The story could of used another sub plot or side adventure to keep things interesting.

Again there were socail statements that wouldn't be acceptable today. But otherwise a good read.

The Mysterious Half - Cat Book Review

The Mysterious Half - Cat Book Review 1936.
The first chapter of the book was intriguing. Judy has a dream and looks to interpret it. An interesting concept and it is important that the first chapter drags you in. 

In this book concepts relating to class and particularly to poverty of the era would not be seen as politically correct in a book today. This is yet another book in which we are introduced to a friend of Judy's who isn't easy to like at the start of the story. In fact the group turn on Peter in a way that makes it hard to like most of the friends in the group.  I had to think for a while about the behaviour I was reading about as it was definitely different in that of other Children's Mystery Series Books I had read. When I thought about it however it was consistent to how teenagers in their groups can act and how they over dramatise things. As a writer I still think that there was a concern in creating too many undesirable characteristics in the main character and her friends that could make the fans turn against the series. The story itself also had the characters linking clues and things together that seemed totally unconnected.

The Invisble Chimes Book Review

The Invisible Chimes was the third book written in the Judy Bolton Series and was published in 1932. 

This is the second Judy Bolton in the series that I have read. (Book 1 was the first) I was a bit concerned in the first few chapters when the book kept referring to what Judy found out/did in the second book which I hadn't read and didn't want too much story info on. After I was over that issue this book was real easy to get into reading. 

Although I didn't feel that it advanced the character of Judy as the first book had (I didn't think I learnt a lot of new things about Judy)  the story was definately compelling. 

I did feel that this cover art spoilt the book somewhat though because as soon as Honey gets the hammer out the front cover art basically showed you what she was doing with it.

I wasn't sure that I could be turned around to like the Honey character but the story was well written and the final twists (which you knew was coming but it was how it was written) made you finish the story feeling you would be happy to see her in future stories.