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

"I will stick to Christ as a burr to cloth."

- Last words of Katharina von Bora, widow of Martin Luther,
on her deathbed, December 22, 1552.

"When people are impoverished, of course they can become thieves, but sometimes they randomly gather together and violate the law. Then they ride tigers that they can't dismount, so they brave death and conduct plunder."

- Chinese

Crazy Old Lady in a Small Town Diner, June 8, 2024

There's a little-remembered 1937 film entitled, Sh! The Octopus, in which the little-remembered but solid bit-part player Elspeth Dudgeon undergoes a memorable, mind-bending transformation from kindly old lady to evil hag in the click of a frame.

On our way to Toronto, we stopped for brunch in a familiar small town diner about a half-hour out. It has the expected trimmings: friendly service, humble but