Stolen Identity is the sixteenth book in the Hardy Boys Adventures by Franklin W. Dixon. The Hardy Boys was originally created by the author Edward Stratemeyer while the new books are written by ghostwriters under the pseudonym Franklin W. Dixon. The original series was first released in 1927, but this book was published 2018 by Aladdin. I listened to the audiobook narrated by Tim Gregory.
Frank and Joe are invited to sneak into a museum with a script from a Sherlock Holmes script only to discover pages has been stolen. Not only that, as the new chief suspect them, the pages start to show up, all placed to frame the two brothers for the theft in a way that calls back to Moriarty and Sherlock’s battles of wits. Except the two brothers now play the role of Sherlock battling an unknown adversary hellbent on bringing them down.
Now, most of the characters are just friends, but we have a new chief of the police since Olaf is away taking care of his sick mother. Chief police Wolf is there to be… Annoying. She is pretty much a copy of every cliché police in these stories, immediately suspecting the boys because she doesn’t like them and harasses them. She is the police chief, what are she doing running around harassing two teenage boys. I know why they had to switch out Olaf, since he has proven previously to actually trust the boys enough that he wouldn’t believe that they would just suddenly steal some pages from a book. So, the author needed to replace him with someone who would, and I don’t like that. It’s lazy writing.
Not to mention that a big part of the story hangs on every friend Frank and Joe has to be stupid enough to “prank” Frank and Joe and sneak the pages from their cousin into their locker and menu, almost framing them. No idea how that is a prank, but as I said, much of the story hangs on the stupidity of their friends.
There aren’t many clues to the real culprit but I was able to guess a bit of the mystery well enough. The author does point at the old cases enough for you to understand at least a bit of the solution. The rest pretty much hits you from the side, and overall, it was decently structured. I did enjoy the mystery well enough, though I kind of found many of the characters too stupid, the new police chief was just cliché. Not to mention, I kept wondering why the boys didn’t call the police. Especially when they found out about the owner of the museum. It just was a bit unbelievable, entertaining, but it did not convince me of the intelligence of the boys.
To summarize, the book was entertaining, thrilling and has a good mystery with a twist. The character irked me, the author making them too stupid for it to be believable, but I guess that is common when authors try to build a mystery. Sometimes you just have to lower the characters intelligence to make the main characters and culprits seem smarter. All in all, I would rate this one a 7 out of 10. It was a decent book for this series, and for the short story it felt developed though I’m not sure about stealing from Sherlock Holmes series, but to be fair. I don’t think it is close enough to actually feel cheap, it was more of a love letter to Sherlock Holmes and for those who like that, I would recommend this book.
With Kind Regards
Senefer.
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