The Girl Is Trouble (review)

Readers of Haines's The Girl Is Murder (BCCB 7/11) just knew Iris Anderson would be back—not only had her gumshoe father virtually promised to introduce her to the trade, but she was left with genuine reason to doubt the claim that her mother's suicide was the result of depression. Now, as the U.S. has fully entered the second World War, Iris is faced with a pair of thematically connected mysteries: first, who is sending anti-Semitic threats to Jewish students in her high school; second, how did Iris' Jewish mother come to die in a hotel room in a notoriously nationalistic German part of New York? Again, fifteen-year-old Iris is notably rash as both an investigator and a daughter, thinking nothing of lying through her teeth to come and go as she pleases, drinking and smoking to impress a guy, and waltzing into danger with nary a plan. It's this bratty heedlessness, though, that accounts for much of the appeal of this blossoming series, as Iris steps into the role of the antithesis to Nancy Drew, the girl detective whom she openly scorns. The gravity of the revelation of Mrs. Anderson's murder makes the nasty shenanigans in the high school seem somewhat trivial by comparison, but the two plot threads in tandem offer fans historical insight as well as a nicely crafted mystery.