#18 A Killing In The Market (30th Anniversary Review)

[tomswift2002]

A Killing In The Market
Published: August 1988
Ghost: Peter Lerangis
Other Hardy Boys by Ghost: (Casefiles) #9 The Genius Thieves, #13 The Borgia Dagger & #37 Danger Zone, (SuperMyster'88) A Crime For Christmas, Shock Waves, Buried In Time (co-author)


Plot: Aunt Gertrude is in love, and had fallen head-over-heels for a New York stockbrocker.  However, Aunt Gertrude soon finds herself as the prime suspect in the murder of her lover.  Can Frank and Joe get their Aunt out of this trouble or will Aunt Gertrude be getting well acquainted with the jailhouse kitchen?


Review:  Out of all the Hardy Boys books out there, this is the only one that really has Aunt Gertrude as a main character in the story.  Most times Aunt Gertrude is a supporting character, but this time she is the prime suspect.  It's intersting that, when you think, only 5 books later, Aunt Gertrude's brother, Fenton Hardy is also made a prime suspect in a murder case.   


Another thing that I'm noticing in the early Casefiles that, as I recall, got dropped in the later ones was just how much Callie was being used and was being shown as an equal to Frank and Joe, which is interesting when you look at the Originals and even the Digests, where Callie was a friend and occassionally helped, but for all intents and purposes was mostly relegated to the side lines because she was a girl and was shown to be nothing more than a girl who was getting ready to be married to Frank, and was a younger version of Laura Hardy and really did what Laura did to Fenton Hardy, in terms of how women were expected to act in the 1920's to the 1970's. 

But here we have Callie, acting as a young woman of the 1980's, and she is demanding of the Hardy's to be let in on the cases (plus without Iola, she does not have another girl friend to talk to or hang out with, like in the Originals).  And in this case Callie does help out, especially when Aunt Gertrude is in the bathroom at the police station and it sounds she is in trouble and the boys start to enter the women's bathroom when Callie stops them and goes in and discover's her future-aunt-in-law trying to escape out the window, and then covers up for Aunt Gertrude by saying that she "fell down". 

Anyway, I found that the criminal was interesting.  I had totally forgotten the surprise twist at the end with the criminal. 

Here's an old review that I did in 2008 (https://www.hardyboyscasefiles.com/forums/index.php?topic=1210.15).

And I would say that A Killing In The Market is still in my Top 5 Hardy Boys Casefiles.

Rating: 9.5 out of 10

[MacGyver]

Nice review! I haven't read this book in many moons so there's little I can add. I do recall the book involved Aunt Gertrude falling in love with a crook (kinda like when Peter Parker's Aunt May married Doc Ock! )
   Two other Hardy Boys books come to mind where Aunt Gertrude played a fairly prominent role- #105 and #166 in the Digests.