Thoughts before reading:
I've never read this one before, but the plot sounds terrible, and so far these super mysteries have been my least favorite type of BSC book...
The basics:
The students at SMS are taking a class trip to Salem over Halloween weekend (lucky kids...). Claudia's parents won't let her go, because her grades haven't been good lately. (Setting up for the next book.) She'll also be running the BSC with Jessi, Logan, and Shannon while the others are gone.
Shortly after arriving in Salem, Mallory runs into an author she loves, Ms. Kempner, who tells her about "the witch's eye": a large, yellow diamond shaped like a small egg, and supposedly cursed. Its owner, Agatha Moorehouse, is staying at the same inn as the SMS group. Ms. Kempner is in town writing a magazine article about the diamond. Of course, all of this piques Mallory's interest too, and she starts keeping an eye on Agatha and Ms. Kempner. That evening she notices a man, Harvey Hapgood, approach them and make an offer to buy the diamond. Agatha declines, saying she's not going to be selling it.
Mallory is also rooming with a girl named Eileen Murphy, who the other kids are teasing and calling a witch, particularly Alan and Cokie. The BSC stands up for her, and eventually the other kids back off.
Stacey and Mary Anne sign up for the museum tour group the next day. The Witch's Eye is on display there, but just as they arrive, it's stolen. Stacey finds a piece of paper nearby the scene of the crime with numbers on it, but the police take it. Mary Anne gets separated from Stacey and heads back to their inn, where she overhears Mrs. Moorehouse complaining that she'll be in financial ruin now, which baffles her, because surely she'd have insurance on something so valuable. Soon after, she finds (and is spooked by) a wig in the bushes outside the inn. Abby, who was nearby because she was out jogging, hears Mary Anne and comes over to see what happened. Together they also find a discarded custodian's jumpsuit. They wonder if the items were used by the diamond thief, and decide to call the police. While they're waiting to use the inn's phone, the desk clerk asks them to run over to the gift shop and deliver a message for Ms. Kempner. While doing so, Abby finds a little ceramic pumpkin that she wants to buy as a souvenir. The clerk doesn't recognize it, and it's the only one, so she gets a great deal. Afterwards, she jokes that it's her pet and names it Cornucopia. (Who wants to bet the diamond is inside?)
That evening, Abby's bag with her hotel key card inside gets stolen, then her and Stacey's room is trashed. Nothing seems to be missing though, so it looks like someone was looking for something specific...
Meanwhile, Stacey hasn't been able to get the numbers she found out off her mind, and she ends up figuring out it's a combination when she notices a safe in the back of her closet at the inn. Not long after her discovery, the power goes off at the inn, giving the girls a chance to creep around and test the combination on some of the safes in other rooms. They don't find anything though.
Kristy sneaks away from her tour group while all this is going on, so she can look for clues herself. She also doesn't find anything, but she does get a chance to scare Alan and Cary, who have been tormenting her the entire trip so far.
Back at the inn, Martha Kempner attacks Abby, causing the Witch's Eye diamond to come out of her pumpkin (I knew it!). The diamond is glowing, an eerie green color. Luckily the police arrive right then and arrest her. Basically, Ms. Kempner was obsessed with the diamond, so she stole it and hid it in the pumpkin so she could retrieve it later. Kristy's upset that the mystery was solved without her.
In Stoneybrook, Jordan Pike has been freaking out the other kids by pretending to cast spells on them.
Timeline:
October, it's Halloween weekend.
Misc. thoughts:
*Alan Gray, Cokie Mason, and Cary Retlin all go on the Salem trip too. Talk about a bad combination! I'm surprised they didn't tie into the mystery somehow.
*Mallory has become a little obsessed with the mystery notebook, even having Jessi send it to her via one of the chaperones who comes late.
*Abby calls Kristy "Agatha Kristy", haha.
*Cary Retlin dresses up as a rat for Halloween... how very fitting.
*Speaking of, the Halloween costumes in here are terrible. Mary Anne is Tigger, Stacey's mother time, Mal is a pumpkin patch, Kristy's Sherlock Bones, and Abby is the women's world cup...
*This book tries to draw a parallel about the Salem witch trials and bullying, via the Eileen plot line, but it falls really flat. Aside from that, there's no history in here, which is really a missed opportunity to make this book more interesting.
*Ghostwritten by Nola Thacker.
Books mentioned:
*The House of the Seven Gables, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
*The Crucible, by Arthur Miller
*From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, by E. L. Konigsburg
My rating:
0 stars. This was really just the worst. Dull as could be, not much plot, a really obvious solution to a not-even-mystery... this could have been 20 pages long and told the exact same story. I could barely even take notes while I was struggling through this.
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