Thoughts before reading:
Honestly not sure if I read this before or not. It's not marked on my childhood BSC book list, but it does look vaguely familiar. If I read it, I guess it wasn't that great...
The basics:
A new museum has recently opened in Stoneybrook, and Claudia's eager to go see the art exhibits. There's even retrospective of Don Newman sculptures being featured, one of her favorites. She decides to go and take a few kids with her to share the experience: Corrie Addison and the Arnold twins.
While Claudia and the kids are at the museum, some coins are stolen from an ancient coin display. Everyone is stopped and searched before being allowed to leave, but the culprit isn't caught. When Claudia recounts the event to the BSC later, they decide this must mean that the thief hid the coins inside the museum. They go back together to search for clues. Claudia does notice one of the people she saw on the day of the theft, a man with two different colored eyes. The girls start following him around, but he notices and leaves soon after. (Finally someone catches on to being tailed by some kids! They can't be that sneaky.)
Despite hitting a dead end, Claudia and Stacey decide to stick around longer and finally check out the sculpture exhibit. It's interactive, where you are allowed to touch the pieces. Claudia's seen a Don Newman exhibit in NYC before, and she recognizes one of the sculptures. This time it feels different though, and she becomes convinced it's a fake. She tells the curator, who barely listens and warns her not to waste his time again. Claudia steals a resume off his desk, deciding he's suspicious. The BSC uses it to look into the museums he worked at before, researching them at the library. They discover that three out of the four had robberies happen while he was employed at them.
Claudia calls Don Newman directly and tells him that something's wrong with his sculpture. He invites her to the formal museum trustee dinner, to look at it together, where they end up catching the custodian with the coins hidden inside the statue. It turns out the curator actually specializes in preventing robberies, and was brought in for that reason.
Meanwhile, Claire Pike has decided she wants to be a star, and becomes obsessed with show business for awhile, before deciding it's not for her after all.
Timeline:
No real clues about the time of year in here.
Misc. thoughts:
*You'd think reading all those Nancy Drew books would help Claudia with her spelling. Reading was how I learned, along with many other bookish kids.
*Mallory's still feeling tired and run down. Claudia thinks her siblings have just finally worn her out, haha...
*Mrs. Pike is working overtime at the temp agency? Is this really a thing?
*Ghostwritten by Ellen Miles
*Even for a BSC mystery, this didn't make much sense. If all these robberies have still happened, than this curator isn't much of a specialist in the field, is he? Besides, how do they know which museums are more likely to have robberies, in order to send him to them? I guess Stoneybrook does have an unusually high crime rate, but what about the other places?
*Claudia's made an honorary trustee of the museum for helping solve the case.
Books mentioned:
None
My rating:
2 stars. This one was pretty hard to get through for me.
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