Saturday, February 24, 2018

Review: At All Costs (SuperMystery #33)

I’ve had this book on my reading list for a while, but never got around to reading it until recently. This is for two reasons. The first reason is that don’t like Hardy Boys books that have an environmental theme. This is because those books tend to be incredibly dull, and the villains’ identities tend to be obvious. (It’s almost always an evil businessman)

The second reason is that “At All Costs” is pretty much a sequel to my least favorite Hardy Boys Casefile, “Survival of the Fittest”. If you’ve never read “Survival of the Fittest”, it basically consists of Frank and Joe body-guarding a kid, then wandering through the desert while the reader is bored to death. Kip Cole appears in both books, and the events of “Survival of the Fittest” are mentioned several times in “At All Costs”.

Fortunately, “At All Costs” is much better then “Survival of the Fittest”. For starters, the pacing is a lot better. There’s a good balance between action and mystery, and there’s some good cliff-hangers. The last half of the book is really fast paced, and unlike in “Survival of the Fittest”, the villains actually know how to use guns.

Unlike some of the more recent Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books, clues don’t appear out of nowhere (save for an incident at the start of the book), and Frank, Joe, and Nancy have to put some effort into their investigation.

The book does a good of giving Frank, Joe, and Nancy equal time to shine, unlike a few SuperMysteries where Nancy takes center stage.

I’m don’t really remember how much Kip appeared in “Survival of the Fittest”, but in “At All Costs”, he’s a major character. We get to meet some of his family, including his sister, Shana, and he joins Frank and Joe for most of their investigation. I can’t help but wonder if there was plans for him to make a third appearance somewhere, as he’s one of the few Casefiles characters to appear in a SuperMystery. *

“At All Costs” does have a few problems.

Nancy knew who one of the villains was by the third chapter, as he just happened to walk into Taylor’s apartment while Nancy and Allison were inside. In the book’s defense, this is handled quite well, with Nancy spending a lot of the book trying to prove that he’s the villain.

However, said villain only appears in person once in the entire book. Nancy doesn’t even talk to him, and all we really know about him is that he is corrupt and that he’s a liar. We know a lot of this because of monologues given by Allison and Kip about his actions, breaking the “Show, Don’t Tell” rule.

There are some twists near the end, but one of them near the end seems to come out of nowhere, and involves a character who never appeared until then, and Frank and Joe only briefly investigated. While his motives make sense, it still felt like a Diabolus Ex Machina.**

You’ll notice I haven’t mentioned Earth At All Costs, the group the book is named after. That’s because there isn’t much to talk about. They appear a bit in the first half of the book, then vanish. They are mentioned as suspects a few times after that, but they don’t appear again.

I think the main problem is that the book has too many villains. There’s several of them and one of them working independently from the others. There’s also a few unnamed henchmen as well.

Then you have Kip and his family, Allison, and the other people that Frank, Joe, and Nancy meet along the way. It felt like the writer had a really hard time dealing with all the minor characters and villains, so you have characters that should be important vanish for most of the book.

Also, I take issue with Joe and Shana dating in this book, as the ghostwriter never mentions the fact that Joe already has a girlfriend. Either the writer didn’t know about Vanessa or didn’t care. To me at least, Vanessa not being mentioned counts as either an error or lazy writing, and I'm deducting 0.2 points off the book's score for it.

“At All Costs” is an enjoyable SuperMystery, despite having too many characters. I would recommend giving it a read.

Rating
6.8 out of 10

*Fenton Hardy and the Grey Man made appearances in some of the other SuperMysteries.

** Major Spoilers below:
  
It was interesting that Frank and Joe actually failed to stop the bomber from blowing up the ski jump, although no one died.  Speaking of deaths, three people died in this book. That’s the most people I’ve seen die in a SuperMystery.

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