The Hampton House Mystery

by Ellen Alexander

Overview

Summer becomes dangerous when Emma and the gang investigate a legend where a local family disappeared. When the teens learn the haunted manor is near their campsite, they decide to investigate-unaware that danger lies ahead.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781643973791
Publisher:	BHC Press
Publication date:	02/20/2024
Series:	Dinswood Chronicles
Pages:	210
Sales rank:	891,522
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.63(d)
Age Range:	13 - 15 Years

About the Author

Ellen Alexander was born in Springfield, Illinois and attended the University of Illinois. After graduation, she moved to Dixon, Missouri with her husband, Jim, and began her teaching career where she taught high school chemistry and physics for twenty-six years. Now retired, she enjoys writing stories inspired by the great mysteries she read in her youth. Today, Ellen is the author of four books in The Dinswood Chronicles series, an exciting mystery-adventure series featuring Emma Higsby and her friends at Dinswood Academy. She and her husband currently live in Columbia, Missouri where Ellen spends her time enjoying her grandchildren and dreaming up new adventures for Emma and the gang.

Editorial Reviews

2023-11-17
A summer campout near a supposedly haunted house turns deadly for a teenage amateur sleuth and her friends in the latest entry in the Dinswood Chronicles series.

Nancy Drew fans will feel right at home in this fourth stand-alone episode, as rising Dinswood Academy junior Emma Higsby, joined by classmates Doug Harwood, Sebastian Conners, and Martha Merriweather (who’s also Emma’s best friend), hear rumors of mysterious doings near a creepy, isolated house. In a strung-out caper hung about with handy coincidences—as well as standard-issue elements from a cryptic message and a hidden tunnel to armed kidnappers and arson—the young sleuths uncover evidence of chicanery in high places. Meanwhile, even as they’re being chased and threatened, previously doused flames of passion flare up again between Emma and Doug. Along with including an improbable twist regarding a new friend who’s an adoptee, the author lets her adolescent characters escape any serious consequences for housebreaking and other mischief as they head, in a delayed but sudden rush, toward a tidy resolution. Alexander shoehorns in an arrest and confession, while never giving the villain even a brief walk-on role and leaving unresolved apparently contradictory revelations about the FBI’s role in all of this. Characters read white.

A thinly disguised pastiche with a notably hurried wrap-up. (Mystery. 12-14)

Kirkus Reviews