It has been over two months since I came back to the United States, and if you are wondering how long it took between my plane touching down, and casing a Dollar Tree for ironic Young Adult novels, the answer is about 30 hours. Having a never-ending supply of free-to-cheap books is one of the highlights of being back.

Speaking of timelines: 12 years ago, while writing about a Nancy Drew book, I mentioned that the series was 82 years old. Meaning it is currently 94 years old. The launching of Nancy Drew is as far from the present day as the Andrew Jackson administration was from that date. Nancy Drew is a venerable franchise, and it seems that it will persist for a while, despite the fact that some of its many reboots and reimaginings have felt stale.

And these were some of the things I was thinking when I opened my copy of the 17th book in one of the many rebootings of Nancy Drew. Entitled "Famous Mistakes", published in 2019, and written by (of

She once found a handwritten note, inside of a shoe

sitting in a box in an antique shop 

 smudged blue ink,  written in a language she did not know 

She threw away the shoe, but kept the note for years,  until finally 

Curosity led her to a library, who sent her to a translator 

The first person deferred,  recommending a retired college

Someone asked me on That Other Site for "a good story of crime on the Dark Web". Now I am royally sick of how every. single. question. about. The Onion Protocol is about "is it true that they have cannibalism? Can I really buy counterfeit gift cards? Can you really buy a baby?"

So I obliged....

Crime on the dark web

Well, I was hanging out on my favorite red room site, on my way to picking up some Babysnax and my monthly supply of