It seems acutely strange to pick up a 'Three Investigators' book with such a short title. There were thirty-eight books ahead of it in the series and every one of those began with 'The Mystery of' or, less often, 'The Secret of'. But here's simply 'The Trail of Terror' and next up is simply 'The Rogues' Reunion', before the series wrapped up with four more 'The Mystery of' titles. Well, that's only in the UK. In the U.S., both these books included the traditional prefix. I have to wonder why Armada suddenly and temporarily felt that it was clumsy. They even stripped it away from earlier books in this new design, including the series list.

Then again, this is an unusual instalment in a number of ways. There's a mystery, even if it isn't in the title, and it's a pretty good one, if also rather simple. On that front, whether this book works will depend on when we see through all the red herrings and coincidences to the truth. There's no doubt we'll get there in the end, but it might take a while, as it did me. I made the time-honoured mistake of safely assuming and fell a cropper because of it. That made this a success for me but, if you see through it quickly, I can imagine that it'll become a little frustrating that nobody actually in the story follows suit until very late.

What works regardless is the unusual approach that could be called action travelogue. The Three Investigators have left Rocky Beach before for mysteries, but when they've done that, it's always been to a single location where they spend the majority of the book. Those are often memorable, like Atlantic Bay on the east coast in 'The Secret of Skeleton Island', Shark Reef off the west coast in 'the Secret of Shark Reef' or even the fictional European country of Varania in 'The Mystery of the Silver Spider'. Here, we leave Rocky Beach soon but never stay anywhere for long because the job this time is to accompany Pete's granddad to New York City by road.

I don't believe we've met this gentleman before because we'd remember the experience, as he's a stubborn and cantankerous character, but still very much one of the good guys. He's also an inventor whose nemesis lives right behind him. That's Ed Snabel and the two have had more than one fiery confrontation in the past. After he goes missing and Jupe promptly tracks him down in a right state outside Snabel's shed, where he sees his missing trowel and can of malathion, which is an insecticide. He's Bennington Peck and I enjoyed him from his very first appearance.

It's an invention that will take him to New York, in an echo of the 'Tom Swift' books of seventy years earlier. Barton Swift had to do the very same thing and bad guys plagued that attempt too. Here, Mrs. Crenshaw, Pete's mum and Peck's daughter, tries to persuade the latter to allow the boys to be his eyes and ears and bodyguards. In a neat touch, he sees right through her but agrees to the suggestion anyway. It'll be fun. She still hires them though to keep her dad safe and that becomes a very astute decision.

It's not a problematic time of year, so the logical route is to head east to Oklahoma City and then angle slightly north through St. Louis, Indianapolis and Pittsburgh. It's a long drive, Google Maps suggesting twenty-eight-hundred miles. Instead, for some reason, Peck chooses to take the coast north to Portland, Oregon, then angle across to Spokane, Washington to head east. That's half of the logical total already, without going east at all but going twice as far north as they need to. It makes little sense until we factor in that Peck's late wife grew up in La Crosse, Wisconsin and they can sightsee at Mount St. Helens, Mount Rushmore and other tourist attractions on the way. For map nerds, this route racks up forty-one-hundred miles. That's a lot of gas.

After the tiny mystery of locating Peck when he doesn't meet Mr. Castro for a scheduled game of chess, they set off and leave the whole Ed Snabel nightmare behind them. Except, when they park on Pismo Beach, they notice that Snabel's there. When they reach Monterey, Snabel's there too, meeting someone and reacting highly suspiciously when he finally catches sight of the boys. They don't see him in San Francisco but he's there in Santa Rosa, looking into Peck's car, having shifted to a different vehicle himself. It would seem that they haven't left the nightmare behind; they've allowed it to follow them and bring a mystery with it.

It only escalates from there. They're attacked by bikers in Crescent City, California, and the same bikers hassle them in the Badlands of South Dakota. That can't be a coincidence. And, after their motel is set on fire in Couer d'Alene, Idaho, they return to their rooms to find them ransacked. It must have been a distraction. Snabel shows up once more in Custer State Park, this time wielding a gun, and a mysterious woman gloms onto both men, initially Peck but, after Pete rescues him at Mount Rushmore, then Snabel. How many people are involved in this mystery? At a sternwheeler in Wisconsin, they bump into the man who met Snabel in Monterrey.

The most obvious component to the mystery is that they're being tracked and eventually, far too late to not embarrass the Three Investigators, they search Peck's car, find the tracker, and neatly dispose of it. The less obvious component is why and that keeps us going. Snabel has been a thorn in Peck's side for a long time, but he steals garden equipment. That doesn't explain following his neighbour across four thousand miles of American countryside. Was that all tied to Peck's work as an inventor? This whole journey was planned to get him to New York to talk with people about his latest invention.

Eventually, as tends to be the case, it's Jupe who figures out what's really going on, but not for a long while. We're three quarters of the way through the book when he lets his companions in on a crucial deduction and suddenly the whole tone of the story changes. Before we have much chance to blink, Bob's a counter spy working with the FBI and the roles everyone has fallen into switch so the boys are the predators and Snabel's the prey. In many ways, the danger is most apparent now, even though they've been through quite a lot on the way across, especially Bob, who was grabbed in Sturgis, Michigan, only to talk his way out of that awkward situation. He steps up well here.

Eventually, of course, Hector Sebastian flies in to take them out to eat and talk through the little details needed to flesh out the whole affair. That includes one glorious little detail that has zero importance at this point in the story, but which would have changed everything much sooner had it come to light, as it easily could have done. Peck's stubbornness can be helpful, but it can also be a serious hindrance. And, with everything addressed, I think he finally realises that.

I liked this book, as unusual as it is. It takes some serious balls to write the thirty-ninth novel in an established and much admired series in a completely different fashion, not only to your own prior contributions, but to everyone else's too. Ironically, given that phrasing, it's the female author of the series who had those balls, but then she'd made other choices in earlier books that prompted a welcome change from a problematic norm. Giving female characters agency is the most obvious, but splitting what seems like one mystery into two is another.

The negatives mostly come down to the simplicity of the mystery, once all false assumptions have been swept aside, and that's going to come down to when you figure that out. I was slow this time, so had no problem with that at all. If you aren't and you grasp what's going on early, you'll lose an awful lot of the mystery and suspense that surrounds the plot. It'll just seem like a travelogue and that may not sustain you to the point where things change.

And, talking of travelogues, I'm actually a little jealous of this road trip, because I was doing a lot of these miles with an ex-girlfriend in 2000, albeit in reverse, but had to cut that adventure short. We'd got to Minnesota going west and had to backtrack to Detroit so that I could fly home to the UK. One day I'll manage to see some of the sights that the boys saw here, or, in some cases, didn't, as Mount St. Helens was lost in the cloud when they were there. I didn't have that problem when I was in Washington state, though did north of the border in the Cascades. C'est la vie, I guess. Oh, and I was never seconded into the FBI for part of that experience. Bob will keep that one over me. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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