Posted on by TracyC

Nate the Great and the Halloween Hunt

NateHalloweenHunt

Nate the Great and the Halloween Hunt by Marjorie Weinman Sharmat, 1989.

Nate the Great gets a Halloween case when Rosamond asks him to help her find one of her cats.  Rosamond and Annie show up at Nate’s house, trick-or-treating.  They’re both dressed as Little Red Riding Hood, and Annie’s dog, Fang, is the wolf/grandmother.

Rosamond has several cats, all named “Hex”: Big Hex, Plain Hex, Super Hex, etc.  But, she’s worried because she can’t find Little Hex.  Every Halloween, her other cats like to go to an old house in the neighborhood that is supposedly haunted in order to help haunt it, but Little Hex is afraid on Halloween and apparently hid somewhere.  Nate thinks that Little Hex will probably come out as soon as Halloween is over, but Rosamond is so worried that he agrees to look for Little Hex anyway.

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Nate interviews kids in the neighborhood to see if they’ve seen Little Hex, but they haven’t.  Then, he and his dog, Sludge, go to the haunted house to look around.  He sees Rosamond’s other cats, but not Little Hex.  There’s a scary moment when he realizes that he’s locked in the house, but Sludge helps him to escape.

Little Hex isn’t as far away or lost as Rosamond thinks, and Nate realizes that both Sludge and Rosamond herself have given him the clues he needs to solve the mystery.  Sludge demonstrates what an animal might do when it’s frightened, and Nate suddenly realizes why Rosamund’s treat basket was so much heavier than Annie’s even though they had been to the same houses.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

The Powder Puff Puzzle

The Polka Dot Private Eye

PowderPuff#4 The Powder Puff Puzzle by Patricia Reilly Giff, 1987.

Dawn is on her way to go swimming with her friend Emily Arrow when her cat, Powder Puff, is startled and jumps into a stranger’s car.  Before Dawn can do anything about it, the car drives away with her cat!

Fortunately, Dawn managed to notice a few things about the car and driver. The car is red and dented.  The driver is tall and skinny and has long, gray hair.  She was eating a jelly cookie and carrying a box and a long pole.  Her license plate had a name on it and that started with “PA,” but Dawn didn’t get to read the rest.

Emily’s father is a police officer, but he can’t trace the license plate with just the letters that Dawn was able to give him.  Instead, he has the kids make Lost Cat posters to put up in the neighborhood.  Still, that’s not enough for Dawn.  As The Polka Dot Private Eye, she should be able to figure out where her own lost cat is!

PowderPuffPicWith the help of her friends, especially Jason, Dawn uses what she knows to put together a picture of the person they’re looking for, and they try to retrace her steps through town.  Can they track down Powder Puff and get him back?

Part of the puzzle that Dawn and Jason overlook at first is the woman’s profession, which is one that the kids hadn’t really expected to find a woman doing, although Dawn spots the clues which point to what the woman was doing in the area and allow them to realize where she had to be going.  Whether more modern kids reading this book would feel the same way about the woman’s profession, I’m not sure.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.