Nancy Drew and her two best friends, cousins Bess Marvin and George Fayne, will begin a new series of adventures in June. Simon and Schuster is targeting the readership of the recently ended Nancy Drew Notebooks series, and the new Nancy Drew and the Clue Crew series should please those same 6- to 9-year-old readers.

In Sleepover Sleuths, Nancy, Bess and George form a detective when they discover a collectible doll owned by their friend Dierdre Shannon is missing the morning after a sleepover party held at Dierdre's house. Nancy and the cousins have to figure out not only who took the doll, but why.

Kids all over River Heights are coming up with new ice cream flavors. A missing ice cream recipe created for an ice cream flavor contest provides the Clue Crew with their second mystery in Scream for Ice Cream.

In both cases, Bess and George exhibit the beginnings of being the mechanical and technological whizzes they are portrayed as being in the Nancy Drew Girl Detective series as they help Nancy gather and track the clues and solve the mysteries.

As in the Nancy Drew Notebooks, the girls are eight years old, their third grade teacher is Mrs. Ramirez, and Nancy has a Labrador retriever puppy named Chocolate Chip.

Gone from the new series are the notebooks Nancy would use to keep track of her clues. The girls now keep track of their clues on Nancy's computer.

Also missing from the new series is Brenda Carlton, who has been replaced by Dierdre Shannon since this new series takes place in the same “universe” as the Girl Detective series. Unlike the Nancy Drew Girl Detective series, any tension between Nancy and Dierdre is from Dierdre's attitude--she even has her own Web site, Dishing with Dierdre--than any romantic overtures toward Ned Nickerson (who only makes a small cameo in the books). Nancy and Dierdre consider each other friends, but not best friends.

One last change is in the name of the school the girls attend. They no longer attend Carl Sandburg Elementary School; their school is River Heights Elementary School.

The Clue Crew mysteries are a fun read and readers can participate with activities at the end of the stories. Instructions for making hats for a PJ fashion show are given at the end of the first book, and at the end of the second book, readers can make homemade ice cream in a build-it-yourself ice cream freezer made of used coffee cans.

It made sense for Simon and Schuster to relaunch the Nancy Drew Notebooks series after the successful launch of the Nancy Drew Girl Detective series and relaunch of the Nancy Drew franchise in 2004. Perhaps, if the Nancy Drew and the Clue Crew books are also successful, Simon and Schuster will consider a young adult (ages 12-up) Nancy Drew series. One can only hope.

Bonus Reviews:

Also coming in June 2006 are the first Hardy Boys Undercover Brothers Super Mystery and the first two books in the new Tom Swift Young Inventor series.

In Wanted, two teen boys are committing crimes all over Bayport and the boys appear to be Frank and Joe Hardy. An all-points bulletin is issued and the Hardy brothers become fugitives. There are a couple of neat twists in the story, which builds to an exciting--and almost cinematic--conclusion.

Inventor Tom Swift, his two best friends, Bud Barclay and Yolanda “Yo” Aponte, are introduced in Into the Abyss, when they accompany Tom's dad on a research vessel. Swift Enterprises is testing a new submersible and also placing seismometers, which will detect seismic activity that could possibly cause tidal waves, on the ocean floor. An unexpected storm hits while Mr. Swift and two assistants are testing the submersible, requiring Tom's ingenuity to rescue them--and himself--from the abyss.

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