What’s up friends, I meant to split up all the Nancy Drew book recaps with a couple of other things, in the interest of not being too repetitive. In this case, I was hoping to post the Hardy Boys game before another Nancy book, but it’s taking me five thousand years to finish the game recap and I managed to burn through this book on my commute the other day, so — let’s have our first 2000s Nancy Drew book! This is the second story that formed the basis of the eighth game, Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake. The first one, Ghost Dogs of Whispering Oaks had the ghost dogs and asshole dudes named Red, while this book brings the Prohibition backstory and the birdwatching. Onwards!
Nancy is roadtripping from River Heights to eastern Pennsylvania to visit Bess and George, who are house-sitting for some unimportant relatives at “Moonlight Lake” over the summer. I guess with the dawn of the new millennium, the books’ anti-Ned agenda has ended, because Ned is with her. Hi, Ned! Glad to see you’ve been reintroduced to the books just in time for the War on Terror and the height of Harry Potter fandom wank.
As soon as they arrive at the house, Bess runs out and wails that weird things have been happening recently and [she’s] sure it’s the restless spirit of a child left behind and drowned when the valley was flooded back in the twenties to form the lake! Heh. Let’s not ease into the backstory or anything.
George tells Nancy that Bess’s imagination is running wild, since there was recently a story in the paper about the creation of the lake back in the Prohibition era, and how some locals think former residents still haunt the area. Still, they admit they’ve been hearing some weird noises around the house, including from above the top floor — but there’s no attic. SpOoKy!
They hear a scream from the woods and quickly meet some of the suspects: Caspar and Millicent Lawrence-Jones, two middle-aged Brits who are out here to birdwatch and hate anyone who might be scaring off the birds; and one Steve Delmonico, a grumpy biker dude who owns a giant dog (not a ghost dog tho) and…runs the local children’s camp? Sure. He has layers. The camp session is already over, though, leaving him plenty of time to run around being a dick to tourists.
Anyway, the scream was because Millicent was running from Steve’s dog and everyone exchanges barbs because the Lawrence-Joneses think Steve should keep his dog leashed and Steve thinks they should get over themselves and all three of them hate the Clue Crew for being Youths and bringing their keggers and loud music and premarital sex with them. Joke’s on you, guys! The only things Nancy’s brought with her are sanctimony and mom jeans.
Bess and George exposit that the cottage they’re staying in used to be a guest house and was part of a larger plot of land. The main house nearby is now owned by one Emily Griffen. Steve hates Emily (and by extension the Clue Crew, again, some more) for buying the land, because he wanted it to expand his camp.
They tour the house and go outside, and Nancy gasps that she sees something on the lake. Before they can look closer, though, Emily Griffen pops by to say hi. In the game, of course, she is better known as Em, wearer of plaid flannel and saying “You betcha!” while selling you worms. Tragically, she does none of these things in the book.
Emily says she heard the ruckus with Steve’s dog and wanted to make sure everything was okay. After she leaves, Bess remarks that it was nice of Emily stop by as soon as she heard trouble. Nancy and George note that she didn’t come over that quickly — the Brits and Steve are long gone — and it looks like she had stopped to get dressed and brush her hair first. Suspicious!
The Clue Crew heads into town the next morning and exposits some more about the history of the area. The town sits on land that used to belong to the Lenape tribe; there’s a reservation nearby and some Lenape activists are trying to reclaim some of the land. (“I bet the people whose pioneer forefathers settled the area found it hard to lose their land,” Ned says. I mean…the Lenape probably found it hard to lose their land too, Ned.) The lake is manmade and there’s some talk of trying to drain it and restore the natural valley, although most people don’t particularly want to.
They go into a shop and meet a Native — presumably Lenape — dude named Jim. He’s super hot and Bess is all into him; he flirts back right up until he finds out they’re staying at “the old Malone house.” I just went back and did a search because I couldn’t remember them mentioning the Malone backstory in the beginning, and no, they didn’t. So they are indeed staying at the old Malone house — or rather the old guest house; Emily is in the Malone house proper — not that it means anything to the reader at this point. It does clearly mean something to Jim, who gets all salty and rude to Bess and storms off. The Clue Crew’s like, “What’s his deal?” His deal is that he’s a dick but clearly not the culprit, because A) the assholes never are and B) even in 2002, people knew the optics of “the villain is a Native American angry about losing their land” were bad.
After that, they troll around the shops some more. A local antique dealer (“Tim“) tells them that salvaging stuff directly from the lake is illegal, although locals can keep anything that washes up on the shore. Ned notes that it’s weird that the lake is apparently still churning things up when storm season is over.
They drive home (bumping “Latin dance music” all the way) (remember the Latin music boom of the 2000s? Do you think Nancy was listening to “Livin’ La Vida Loca” or “Whenever, Wherever“?) and nearly get T-boned by Jim, who’s coming out of the road that leads up to the Malone house. He’s all disproportionately aggro that they didn’t notice him trying to turn out onto the road. If they were going straight and you were turning, Jim, they had the right of way!
When they get home, Emily runs up and tells them that their cottage has been broken into. She saw a guy in a dark car — maybe a truck or an SUV — tearing off, but didn’t catch much else. The Clue Crew notes that Jim was driving a black truck. As is par for the course in a Nancy Drew book, the mystery burglar didn’t actually steal anything of value, but instead pulled up some of the floorboards, clearly in search of historical buried treasure something. Nancy notices that two handymen have driven up to Emily’s house and thinks that it’s odd that the burglar seemed to have run off in the middle of his search — she didn’t hear the handymen pull up, so how could the burglar have been alerted that the Clue Crew came home? Suspicious!
(Bess, for her part, points out that the handymen didn’t roll up blasting “The Ketchup Song“, which might’ve been what tipped the culprit off. Heh. Nancy is not stealth.)
Nancy finishes pulling up the floorboards, but is disappointed to see that there’s nothing underneath. She then notices that there are several floorboards that have been newly nailed down, which means that the culprit has done this before. Everyone is creeped out, especially Bess, but Nancy’s like, “Well, they didn’t actually take anything, so let’s not call the police and just keep sleeping here with the doors unlocked.” Nancy, for the love of God.
Nancy goes over to ask Emily if she saw anything else, and comes across Emily talking ~suspiciously~ to the handymen. After they leave, Emily tells Nancy that she’s hired them to help fix the house up, but it’s taking more money and work than she expected. She also implies that she wishes she could’ve bought the guest cottage, too, which Nancy is intrigued by.
But before she can ask more questions, another character is introduced: Emily’s college friend, Ravi. He’s here to work on a documentary about “communities flooded out by government hydroelectric projects in the early and midtwentieth century.” That’s…specific. (I’m assuming he’s referring to the bajillion dams built during the New Deal, although in the nicest way possible, I can’t imagine there are more than like 5 people who would watch a 2-hour documentary about that. Good luck funding it, Ravi.)
Ravi remarks that he’s surprised Emily could afford the Malone house, and Emily is weird and curt about it; there’s generally a lot of weird tension between them that doesn’t really get resolved. Like did they have an awkward breakup, Wade and Savannah-style? It’s never explained.
Ned and Nancy go for a swim on the lake; Ravi warns them to watch the weather, as it’s expected to storm later. Naturally, Ned and Nancy fall asleep in the sun and when they wake up, a storm is rolling in and they are VERY DRAMATICALLY stranded on a platform in the middle of the lake. The Malone house is too far for them to swim, so they VERY DRAMATICALLY swim to Steve’s camp instead and then they nearly get struck by lightning but they don’t and then they nearly get hit by a falling tree but they don’t. They’re both in their bathing suits for this entire thing, by the way.
Steve comes across them and yells at them that they’re trespassing and to get off his property. Yes, even though there’s a storm raging and Nancy and Ned have no protective clothing whatsoever, not even shoes. Ned and Nancy are like, “Dude, what an asshole,” which I feel vindicated by because I used to not own a car, and I will just say that the amount of aggression people use to chase pedestrians off their property is like, inversely proportionate to their willingness to put up any fences or signage indicating the land as such. Anyway, Nancy and Ned have to go tromping through the woods barefoot to get back to the Malone house, and on the way, who should they come across but Jim. He’s poking around a cave in the woods and, as usual, acts overly defensive and pissy when Nancy and Ned approach him. They decide not to pick a fight and run off.
They get back to the cottage and I guess the storm only lasted a little while, because it’s still before dinnertime. They head over to Emily’s for dinner and a movie (or “a video”, as Ravi puts it, God bless). Ravi has rented a film noir set during the Prohibition era* and a little ways into the movie, they recognize the setting and realize it was filmed around the Malone house. Everyone thinks this is pretty cool, except for Emily, who is super freaked out, FOR SOME REASON. She says that she didn’t know “the Malone house” was once owned by Mike Malone, notorious Prohibition-era gangster. Ravi points out that Emily’s entire senior project was about Prohibition-era gangsters, how could she not know this was Mike Malone’s house? “I thought it was some other gangster named Malone because all 1920s criminals were Irish,” Emily doesn’t say. (Also, absolutely hilarious of the game to make him even more stereotypical by calling him Mickey instead of Mike.) The Clue Crew speculates that perhaps their mystery culprit is looking for Malone’s loot, although they quickly assume the feds must’ve taken it all away when they arrested Malone. I bet they didn’t.
(* Sidebar: I’ve been on a pre-Code movie kick recently and was watching Loose Ankles, and it is super, super funny to hear people talking about the Prohibition as a current event. I love old shit.) (Also hilarious to see that fuckboys with chest tattoos were a thing 100 years ago. We were never safe!)
On their way back to the house, Nancy sees a strange light in the woods and decides to check it out. She hears a scream and runs toward it, only to fall over a trip line and set off a camera. She hides while the Brits run out and yell about how Those Damn Kids ruined their chance to get a photo of a screech owl. Nancy realizes the scream was just the owl’s call and feels silly, but then her eavesdropping pays off when the Brits say they’ve noticed a mysterious canoe on the lake at night, as well as heard weird industrial drilling/digging noises. The Brits are annoyed that all this activity will scare off “the Canada geese.” They’re…they’re desperate to see Canadian geese? Just hit up any parking lot in North America, dudes.
Mr. Brit ominouses that “nothing [he’s] tried” has worked to keep The Youths away; Nancy wonders if he’s behind all the weird incidents and decides that either way, she’s going to march over tomorrow to yell at them for trying to scare people away from the lake. She totally doesn’t, though. Nancy, if you’re not going to follow through on your sanctimony, I don’t know what we’re doing here.
That night, Nancy hears something shuffling around the floor above her, and decides to check it out. She finds a secret door behind the wardrobe in her room, and a passageway that leads to a crawl space above the house. She realizes the culprit has gone out the other end of the passageway and tries to follow, but the culprit escapes and bolts the passageway from the outside. The wind has blown the passage door in Nancy’s room shut too, so she has to bang on the walls until the rest of the Clue Crew rescues her. They open the door at the other end of the passage — which is in the kitchen — and note that the hinges have been oiled recently.
They then go back up to the crawl space to see what’s up there. They mostly find trunks full of women’s clothes and various girly shit; the book tries to build tension about WHAT COULD THESE BE DOING HERE and WHO COULD THEY BELONG TO except then Nancy immediately finds love letters confirming Malone had a fiancée (“Nellie”), so the breathless speculation was kind of pointless. The letters are super explicit about all of Malone’s crimes and all the loot he’s collected and where he’s put it and what he’s planning to do with it. The best criminals confess to their crimes in writing, as we know. I guess that’s why he was one of the mobsters who was caught by the feds and not one of the ones that escaped notice long enough to build a mansion and stare at a green light every night and eventually get shot in a pool as a metaphor for the American Dream.
Nancy goes the local museum to show them the letters and runs into Jim again. He shows her some dioramas he’s working on, which show the valley before and after it was flooded to make Moon Lake. Nancy notes that there are a bunch of pins dotted around the Malone house and lake. When she asks about them, Jim gives her a sensible explanation about still working on his diorama and using the pins to mark model spots or something. No, of course not. Instead, he gets really tense and weird and makes Nancy even more suspicious of him.
The museum director comes back and Nancy shows her the letters. The director is intrigued that Malone seems to have known about the plan to flood the valley before it was announced to the rest of the town, since he was already planning to build a boathouse on the property. The director says they can prove when Malone started work on the boathouse, as he would have had to file architectural plans with the town. When they look, though, the plans are missing! Nancy wonders if the plans were what was under the floorboards of the house. Then she notices that Jim is lurking at the door and must have overheard most of their conversation, because he’s smirking not at all subtly.
Nancy decides to pay Emily a visit and update her about what she’s found. When she gets to Emily’s house, though, Emily isn’t there. Nancy pokes around and sees that the boathouse door is open, although there’s no one inside, either. In the boathouse, though, she finds Malone’s architectural plans! The plans have been drawn on with ballpoint pen — implying it’s been done recently, as ballpoints didn’t exist in the ’20s — with arrows pointing to the boathouse and lake. And then someone sneaks up behind her and whacks her on the head. Hell yeah!!! We haven’t had a traumatic head injury since…oh, wait, actually since literally the last book I posted. In my defense, it’s been a while.
Nancy comes to a while later, still in the boathouse. Emily has found her and is upset to find that the boathouse plans are gone, as that means she’ll have to spend even more time/money on the renovation. Nancy weirdly doesn’t press Emily about having the plans in the first place. Emily says that there are lots of people who would want her to give up the Malone property — Steve wants the land to expand his summer camp; Jim wants it back for the Lenape. Nancy brings up that the Brits are annoyed that all the noise around the lake — like the “drilling” they’re hearing at night — is driving away the rare and elusive Canadian goose, so they’d also have a reason to want people to leave. Emily clams up at the mention of drilling and says she’s never heard any such thing.
Then Nancy brings out the love letters and tells Emily about the crawl space in the house. She thinks Emily will be thrilled to have more material for her gangsters-of-the-early-20th-century project, but instead Emily acts all uptight and unenthused and seems to not even remember that she’s a historian or journalist or whatever the hell her job is. Then Nancy’s like, “I wonder who this Nellie chick was? I bet a rich gangster like Malone had a ton of girls on him” and Emily gets all offended like, “Actually Nellie was Mike Malone’s TRUE LOVE and they DEFINITELY GOT MARRIED and their love was REAL and PURE and FOREVER.”
This woman is not subtle at all. I feel like you could figure out what she’s up to even without playing the game and having her chase you around with a dog bone.
One of the handymen comes back and implies that Jim was skulking around earlier and possibly was the one who knocked Nancy out. Then the Clue Crew has a picnic dinner with Emily, and there’s a brief interlude where Nancy bounces her theories about the mystery off Ned, which I enjoy because I am a Ned apologist forever. I love when he gets to be useful. During their dinner, Nancy sees two guys in a boat sail over to Emily’s dock. She warns Emily, who doesn’t seem particularly concerned and refuses to investigate. I WONDER WHY. Nancy wonders who the mystery boaters are — the handymen? The Brits? Jim and his evil twin?
She sneaks over later to try and bust them, and runs into Jim, again. He has a knife and Nancy immediately tries to fight him off with her mad karate skillz, but OH NO, Jim has mad karate skillz, too! (“He’s been trained in martial arts!” Nancy gasps to herself. Hee.) Jim insists that he’s not trying to jump Nancy: he’s investigating because he thinks something weird is going on, too. Well, I’d rather have his help than Frank Hardy’s. Before they can join forces, however, our culprits sail away and Jim…takes that as his cue to leave? You’re not gonna explain yourself, Jim? Whatever.
Nancy goes to tell Emily about this, and on her way into the house, she sees that Emily has a bunch of wet, algae-covered junk in her mudroom. Then she finds Emily talking to one of the handymen, whose hair is wet. Nancy wonders if Emily and the handymen are working together to illegally dredge up artifacts from the lake, but then she’s like, “Eh, well, it’s none of my business.” Wait, what? She was all ready to yell at the Brits for taking birdwatching too seriously, but she doesn’t care that Emily is doing something that’s literally illegal? Nancy is so hilariously hypocritical about the law when it comes to people she likes.
The next day, Ravi says he visited some old woman in the town who had a bunch of old artifacts and scrapbooks dedicated to the history of Moon Lake. The old lady told him that basically everyone in town knew that Malone had a treasure squirreled somewhere — the feds were never able to find it, though, and Malone’s wife never ratted him out. Everyone gasps that Malone really was married to Nellie. Ravi says he has to leave to keep working on his overly-specific dam project, but he’ll call Emily with the news, which he’s sure will blow her mind. Why is Ravi even here? Nancy or literally anyone else could have taken the part of finding all this stuff out (it’s not like Bess and George have been doing anything important) and the only unique aspect of his character is his tension with Emily that never gets resolved.
Anyway, Nancy says that Ravi’s news will not blow Emily’s mind, because she’s sure Emily knew about the treasure all along — she must have learned about it during her research and bought the Malone house to look for it. Still, she’s confused — what does any of this have to do with Emily and her minions dragging the lake, and why would she have stolen the boathouse plans if she already has them? (That second bit is weird, because it implies that there are two sets of plans — the ones stolen from the museum and the ones Emily had, and thus it’s not weird that Emily had them at all? I don’t know.)
Nancy decides that the best time to keep investigating is in the middle of the night, you know, when Emily and the handymen are awake and searching the lake for artifacts. She sees a motorboat pulling away from Emily’s dock and jumps into a random canoe to follow it. The person in the motorboat obviously notices the only other person on the lake (Nancy is not stealth x2), and their accomplice sneaks up in another boat. They knock Nancy’s canoe over and try to drown her. She blacks out and is pulled to shore by Jim, who explains yet again that yes, he’s a good guy: he’s been investigating because some of the Lenape’s archaeological sites have been disturbed; he’s also been noticing the weird noises at night as well. He suspects Emily’s handymen are the culprits, as they’re known to be petty criminals who have been illegally salvaging from the lake for ages; Tim sells their obviously stolen goods and just ignores the illegality of it all. It’s pretty funny how Nancy might’ve been a bit quicker on the uptake if she had ever just asked the locals about each other.
(Sidebar: There’s been a bit of a sideplot where the Clue Crew keeps finding little cairns that Jim’s been building around the lake, which he’s been using to mark old gravesites and other places of interest to the Lenape. Nancy won’t shut up about Jim and his “fetishes” and in this scene she’s all like, “Explain your fetishes to me, Jim!” This is technically a correct use of the word fetish, but like…I snickered. Maybe she wants to see if Jim’s willing to wear a rubber catsuit and dance in an Italian nightclub with her.)
From the shore, Jim and Nancy see one of the handymen retrieve a trunk, and Emily gasps that they’ve found it. Nancy’s like, “Wait, nevermind, Emily’s still evil too!” The handymen are more evil, though, since they try to knock Emily out and take the trunk for themselves. Jim and Nancy stop them, then Emily tries to escape, then Nancy tackles her and breaks the trunk open, revealing a bunch of jewelry and gold. Then the police arrive, having been alerted by the rest of the Clue Crew, who woke up because of the weird noises and found Nancy gone. The police arrest the handymen, and Emily protests that the treasure rightfully belongs to her: she’s Mike and Nellie Malone’s great-granddaughter. Shock! Everyone’s like, “Didn’t your great-grandparents make their money stealing from other people?” and she’s like, “Stop saying words.”
The police don’t arrest Emily, but they confiscate the treasure and say they’ll have to investigate who it properly belongs to, as well as Emily’s claim of ownership should they decide the Malone family gets to keep it. Emily agrees to go with them and Nancy hilariously barges her way in, saying she’s going down to the station too because surely the police will appreciate her witness statement. Hee. Emily sniffles that she’d appreciate Nancy’s company. The book doesn’t really treat Emily as a villain; I guess we’re meant to sympathize with her romanticizing being the heir to a ’20s outlaw couple’s treasure. It’s never made clear whether Emily knew the handymen were knocking Nancy out and trying to drown her, though, because that would make her…a lot less sympathetic.
The next day, Nancy gathers the Clue Crew to explain the plot. Malone, having known that the valley was going to be flooded, buried his treasure in such a way that it would get swept out to the lake, and Nellie was meant to retrieve it after his arrest. The FBI were watching her too closely, though, so she never got a chance to. She and Malone kept writing to each other when he was in jail, and Emily came upon the letters while researching her Prohibition-gangsters project. From the letters, she learned that Nellie had a son (with Malone? The timing is kind of fuzzy) whom she gave up for adoption, and the adopted family’s name was Griffen. Emily figured out she was related to the Malones and visions of green lights started dancing in her eyes. She found plans for the cottage in the main Malone house, which is how she knew about the secret passageway. Okay, but…where did she get those plans for the boathouse?
Oh, speaking of, the boathouse had nothing to do with anything. Nancy speculates that Malone meant to bury his treasure there at first, but then he decided not to. Whatever. Also, it’s not really explained why and how Malone made his money. What kind of criminal was this man? It’s implied that the jewelry is his “loot” so like…was he a jewel thief? Was he a bootlegger? Did he throw the 1919 World Series?
I don’t know, and the ghostwriter definitely doesn’t care enough to explain. We finish off with the Brits coming by to apologize for suspecting the Clue Crew of being up to no good just because they’re youths. As a parting joke, they give Nancy the photo their birdwatching camera captured when she accidentally tripped their screech owl setup. Everyone has a hearty chuckle over Nancy looking hella moded, as we said in 2002, then I guess they spend the rest of the summer swimming and bumping “Hot in Herre“, as we also did in 2002.
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