In the usual tradition of the Nancy Drew books, timelines mean nothing. It’s now winter, after jumping around from mysteries taking place in fall, spring, summer, back to fall, and then to summer again, then to – well, you get the picture. So now it’s wintertime, and Nancy is still the eighteen-year-old renowned amateur detective and daughter of noted lawyer Carson Drew.

Mystery at the Ski Jump returns to an early formula where Carson Drew is tackling a legal case and Nancy has a mystery of her own that somehow intersect. It’s as if in the whole wide world every person Nancy happens to run into is somehow connected to the mystery at hand. There’s never a dead end or false lead in Nancy’s world. Everything seems to pan out for her and go her way.

Nancy and her father live in the fictional town of River Heights with their longtime housekeeper Hannah Gruen, who’s more like a member of the family. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean the Drews have provided well for Mrs. Gruen, apparently, as she feels the need to invest in some dubious stock being sold door-to-door. The stock is in a fur company, and Hannah also purchases a high-quality mink stole to go along with the stock.

Her curiosity piqued, Nancy begins digging around River Heights and soon learns that Hannah wasn’t the only one conned into buying the stock. However, she has difficulty pinning down exactly what’s wrong with the company. This was a time before the internet where you could just Google a company and get information on it and I found it hard to hold back the modern trappings from my mind while reading it.

The mystery leads from River Heights to New York City to Montreal and finally to a resort in the Adirondacks. There, Nancy puts everything together, including bringing her father’s client together with a long-lost mentor from his boyhood who was the only bright spot in an otherwise cheerless life.

Mystery at the Ski Jump also marks another example of Nancy being able to do everything, and do it perfectly. In the past, she’s demonstrated expertise at everything she’s had to do, from tap dancing to scuba diving to horseback riding and more. With it being wintertime, we learn that Nancy was once an excellent figure skater whom her father thought would turn professional. She’s also a natural-born skier who learns how to jump with ease. As my thirteen-year-old daughter said, “Is there anything Nancy can’t do and better than anyone else?”

There were some nice scenes that also show how times have changed. My daughter was shocked to read about Nancy accepting a date with someone other than her steady beau, Ned Nickerson, and enjoying time with the young man. I explained to her that it used to be that people dated quite a bit casually, and it wasn’t serious until there was a promise between them. There does appear to be a sort of understanding between Nancy and Ned, but he does show some jealousy over Nancy’s enthusiasm for her father’s latest client.

The book moves along at a breakneck pace. There’s hardly a page where something isn’t happening in connection with her mystery. I really like how Nancy’s best friends, George and Bess, got involved on their own and solved part of the mystery for her. It’s always nice to see them doing something more than simply tagging along in Nancy’s shadow.

The book wasn’t one of the best, but it wasn’t one of the worst. The ghostwriter of this novel returns to a formula that’s been seen in the past with the series, and I’m a bit sorry to see it. I thought the books were better when Nancy’s mystery was separate from her father’s work, or when they were both working on the same thing right from the start, rather than having the coincidence of both their cases being related. However, it’s a pretty good page-turner as far as the mysteries go. There’s no great revelation or surprises in the story, but the action moves along and made me want to see how it would pan out.

This was the last book my daughter read for a while. She wasn’t crazy about Nancy being perfect all the time and being able to excel at seemingly every single thing she did. She said she would have liked to have seen George be the one skilled on the slopes for a change, rather than Nancy. She also felt it was too contrived that Nancy could step into a figure skating program with a partner and perform as if they had spent months rehearsing their routine. At least Nancy and Ned did get lost in the woods and needed rescuing!

Mystery at the Ski Jump isn’t the best of the Nancy Drew books, and it’s not the worst, either. At best, it’s average. I think most girls today get tired of Nancy being perfect, although I am sure at the time her skills were looked at in more of a role model fashion. It has lost something of its luster with this generation, and I have to admit I get tired of it, too. However, a mystery in a wintry setting is unusual in the series, and there are some good moments.  I think most younger tweens will like the book with no problems.  Older ones will see through the faults.

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