“Eloise Drew invites her niece and the cousins to a cabin near Cooperstown, New York to solve the mystery of a woman who glides across the water. Upon arriving, Nancy becomes involved in a vacation hoax when she is mistaken for a woman in on the fraud. On the wooded mountain near the cabin, a weird luminescent green sorcerer appears, threatening to cast an evil spell on those investigating his strange activities. A lost treasure involving the gliding woman leads Nancy to uncover a cleverly concealed criminal operation in the woods. “

As I mentioned with The Double Jinx Mystery (Nancy Drew Mysteries #50), I have fond memories of this book because my older sister read The Secret of Mirror Bay (Amazon) (AbeBooks) to me as a bedtime story when I was very young. It was not long after I was introduced to these books that the 1970’s TV show starring Pamela Sue Martin aired, so I was all in when it came to Nancy Drew.

However, after reading this book, I found nothing magical about the book, and it’s a run-of-the-mill mystery. So little interesting things happen that I barely made any notes upon re-reading it. The girls are invited by Aunt Eloise to Cooperstown, New York to solve the mystery of the woman who walks on the water (as it turns out, the woman is on stilts, and when Nancy and the girls see her, her stilt gets stuck and she falls into the water, at risk of drowning until Nancy saves her).

The book is sort of a travelogue since they’re visiting Cooperstown, the home of the Baseball Hall of Fame and also of James Fennimore Cooper, so there’s a bit of an info dump about the area, but at this point, that’s to be expected in a Nancy Drew novel of the 1970’s. Yet there are also some old tales and ghost stories thrown in, too. It’s all kind of a mish mash of a variety of mysterious elements that only works some of the time.

Of note, Burt’s uncle Matt, who is a professor, visits and he and Aunt Eloise warm up to each other. And in one scene, Burt puts his arm around George. How fresh and forward-thinking. Normally Nancy and the gang show no elements of affection with their “special friends.”

While the nostalgia part of the book for me was great, the mysteries were just so-so.

For my Nancy Drew book reviews, click here.

For more information about my favorite sleuth, check out Jenn Fisher’s Unofficial Nancy Drew website, which has a wealth of information.

For more information on series books, Jennifer White has a fabulous website that you can visit by clicking here.

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