2 out of 5

Young Jean, her sister Lois, and their caretaker Ellen have moved to Herbertstown to stay with Silas Trott, an old family friend who has agreed to house the girls – and Ellen – after the passing of their mother and father. Herbertstown is a very small, folksy place, a big change for the trio, and Silas himself is quite an oddity: using particularly dated language (‘thees’ and ‘thines’) and running a puzzling business of buying up lots of old, distressed furniture and storing it all about his home. Jean and Lois nonetheless settle into a comfortable enough routine, each finding a friend in the neighborhood, and each independently discovering some mysteries that Si remains very cryptic about if questioned: a locked room upstairs; tunes that make me suddenly wistful; strange letters in his room; and most puzzlingly, a small, red house across the way that he also keeps locked up tight, windows boarded.

Pitched as a “spine-chiller” on the back cover, this 1950s young adult novel is clearly meant to be of The Hardy Boys / Nancy Drew legacy, spinning local curiosities into twisty-turny – and possibly dangerous! – discoveries for Jean and Lois, but writer Augusta Seaman has a lot of trouble getting the story to extend to its 170ish pages, using the format of journal entries from the leads to be a bit too step-by-step descriptive of every night in their new home. The setup of this initially peculiar life with Trott is pretty compelling, as Seaman uses that step-by-stepness to effect sharp elucidations of our primary characters, and so there’s enjoyment in “knowing” Jean, Lois, and Ellen pretty immediately, and witnessing their fish-out-of-water adjustments. But once things shift into relative normality, there’s simply not enough to add drama around a locked room and locked house; yes, we get eventual peeks inside, and I get that there’s a sense of wonder to being a kid and exploring this stuff that is maybe lost in my jaded adulthood (and reading this decades after the fact), but the procedural nature of the writing is consistent throughout. Meaning: when sequences could / are supposed to be tense, they’re still treated with this beat-by-beat explanatory tone that rather stifles any potential tension.

It’s really just a “mystery” that never feels like much of one; there aren’t really twists and turns so much as waiting for details, which are delivered briefly and without much pageantry, until a legit exposition dump at the end lays out all the Whats and Whys, but by that point, Seaman has done enough to remove any lingering intrigue such that it’s just, like, okay, cool story. With a bit more complexity in the plot to bounce off of, the detailed way Augusta moves about scenes could’ve made for a pretty unique spin on the teen detectives genre.