Bonfire Masquerade (5) (Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys) Paperback – July 12, 2011

Great book my 9 year old loved this book. It took her a few days to read it aloud to me

This book impressed me just as much as some f the classic 90s Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew crossovers. The suspects were richly entertaining. The mystery kept me guessing and the action was fun from beginning to end. The other Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew crossovers from the newswires were a letdown after this.

Great story. Early 2000s modern twisted on the 1970s characters. The guys are now secret agents. Nancy Knows this from a previous book. Nancy and friends work an arson case from one end thugs end up working the case officially from the other. Boom! Same case

This is a great book although it is more scary than some books(e.g. Hostage situations, murders, etc.). It's suspenseful yet fun and was definitely a page turner. Also, make sure you don't forget to look for who's perspective the chapter is being told from.

I love the books that have the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew together. Both sets of books were my favorite growing up, and I love how my daughters can get both together.

I have really enjoyed all of the super mysteries. I find them very thrilling. I would encourage any young reader who likes mysteries to read this series.

the other super mysteries where better but it was good. im righting more about it because if i dont i cant submit it

I had bought and read the first three books in the series. As a fan of Nancy Drew from the time I was seven and a fan of the Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys super mysteries from the first series back in the late eighties/early nineties, I was curious as to the new versions of the characters. The first three books, while dumbed down for what I think teens of today can handle, had some cute moments that propelled me to order the fourth book. Eager as I was to get my hands on it, I had some expectations for horribleness. For starters, the whole switching between points of view is a literary no-no and made my inner writer weep each time I read one of the books. I put that aside in hopes of it being the only painful part of the book.Not so with this one. The whole book was one pain after another. As stated above, the book is horribly dumbed down. If one is to go by the writing style of the first Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys books, kids in the thirties, sixties, and nineties were a lot smarter than kids today. This is decided purely on the virtue that those books were longer, had more plot, smaller print, and were a lot more entertaining. I'm not saying kids now-a-days aren't smart, but this book made me wonder what the author and publishers think about today's youth.It also broke many rules of writing that I have tried to hammer into the minds of young writers. Things like, don't write in all caps (this happens at least twice in the book, where italics would have been more appropriate), don't put in double punctuation at the end of sentence, and don't ever use chat speak. My first migrane of the book came from reading Bess say, "OMG". I'm serious, that phrase was uttered in this book. On page 13, to be precise. It has always been a good rule of thumb to leave out cultural references that can date your story, especially if you want it to last the test of time. As dated as the old Nancy Drew books were (and I still giggle when read about them trying to find a pay phone or dealing with a floppy drive) they never used slang that I can remember. It was only dated by the technology, not the wording. And, frankly, I don't care if kids now use OMG in everyday talk, it's silly and should never be printed in a published novel.Another thing that was horribly wrong is our title characters don't meet up until page 80. In a book just a tad over 160 pages, that means you've trugged half way through the book on two supposedly sepperate (but ultimately tied together) mysterious before you get to read what you picked up the book to read. That's bad and boring writing. That leaves precious little time for them to catch up on their respective mysterious and go after the bad guys as a team. It felt really rushed and rather clumsily put together. It was a storyline that would have worked in a longer novel, but the current format means things have to happen faster than what they did in this one.I would say that it was harder for me to figure out the villian, but that was probably only because I was so busy putting the book down and walking away in disgust that it didn't register. The first three were cute, but I really don't advise wasting money on this one. Whoever was hired to take on the name of Carolyn Keene and Franklin Dixon for this part of the series needs to remember that kids don't like to be talked down to. The target age for the Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys books has gone down. When I started reading them, it was young teenagers, probably around 15 on up. Now they are marketed for kids 8-12? The standards of the books have gone down as well. The old Super mysteries were just over 200 pages of small print. If this book was printed as small, it would be less than half its size now. It's a real shame to see this change in a book series I have loved as a child and had hoped to enjoy with my own children. In the effort to modernize it, the Syndicate that owns the rights to Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys allowed it to be reduced to barely a book length and filled with horribly written tripe that is a turn off rather than the storytelling that has caused these characters to endure for decades.