‘The Nancys and the Case of the Missing Necklace’ introduces Tippy Chan, her Uncle Pike and his boyfriend Devon.
‘We need to look for the head,’ I said.
Devon swung around. His and Uncle Pike’s eyes bugged out at me.
‘What?’ I said. ‘Isn’t it our biggest clue?’
My uncle tapped his lip. ‘She does have a point.’
‘Oh my God, are you serious? We can’t have Tippy seeing that.’
‘Tippy, you’re not to look at the head.’
I shrugged. ‘Sure, I don’t mind.’ Part of me would have liked to have seen what it looked like, though.
What’s it about?
I’m stealing the blurb for this one:
Tippy Chan is eleven years old, and she lives in a small town in a very quiet part of New Zealand – the town her Uncle Pike escaped as a teenager, the moment he got a chance. Now Pike is back with his new boyfriend Devon to look after Tippy while her mum is on a Christmas cruise.
Tippy can’t get enough of her uncle’s old Nancy Drew books. She wants to be Nancy and is desperate to solve a real mystery. So, when her teacher’s body is found beside Riverstone’s only traffic light, it looks like Tippy’s moment has arrived. She and her minders form The Nancys, a secret detective club.
But what starts as a bonding and sightseeing adventure quickly morphs into something far more dangerous. A wrongful arrest, a close call with the murderer, and an intervention from Tippy’s mum all conspire against The Nancys. But regardless of their own safety, and despite the constant distraction of questionable fashion choices in the town that style forgot, The Nancys know only they can stop the killer from striking again.
Whatever the cost…
What’s it like?
Silly. Camp. Ultimately very sweet with a suitable amount of realism despite all the daft chat and feel good moments (some relationships can be fixed in the closing pages, but some are just too broken). Despite the Nany Drew references, this is not a read for children: Tippy’s minders are quite fond of the f word, and the c word, though Devon does thoughtfully reduce one character’s rather rude epithet to ‘sea-hag’. When they aren’t using inappropriate language they are making inappropriate jokes, though, thankfully, many of these pass over Tippy’s head.
Devon wrote Suspect and underneath wrote Sally Horner. ‘No,’ Uncle Pike said. ‘It’s not Sally. I refuse to believe it.’ …
‘Okay, it’s not her.’ Devon underlined her name twice.
Despite a theoretically rather gory murder, this is a cosy crime novel where we never doubt that Tippy and her Uncles will survive, despite their penchant for ignoring police advise and exposing their niece to some very questionable situations
Slightly frustratingly, the murderer is obvious from very early on, but then again, this isn’t really a book about that: the crime is just the vehicle required to encourage Tippy, Pike and Devon to entertain readers by vandalising Tippy’s mum’s property in the name of sleuthing and ‘investigate’ by eyeing up suspects (Devon), making dirty jokes (Pike) and listening to adults while pretending to play games on her mobile (Tippy). Oh, and there’s a beauty show finale that would definitely appear near the end of a rom-com or on a ‘and then everybody clapped’ Facebook page.
Final thoughts
This is a fun and ultimately sentimental tale of sleuthing, slinking and skulking, which kicks off a new series featuring Tippy Chan and her uncles. Expect increasingly ridiculous antics from both the sleuths and their prey alongside a few genuinely sad moments and a very sweet denouement.
‘The Nancys’,
R.W.R. McDonald,
2025, Orenda books, paperback
Many thanks to the publisher and Anne Cater’s Random Things Tours for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review and a spot on the blog tour.
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