Mary Anne and the Haunted Bookstore (a Baby-Sitters Club book published in 1998) has been in my life for a long time. My parents very sweetly went to B. Dalton in the mall to pick it up when I had chicken pox in second grade. Notably the book is a bit fever-dreamish, which I had, at the time, attributed to the aforementioned chicken pox. However, an adult reread reveals that it is notably meandering (approximately 45 pages longer than any other non-Super Special BSC book). In short (difficult to do with a book such as this), some guy decides to open an Edgar Allan Poe-themed Horror/Mystery bookstore in Stoneybrook, CT. It’s actually kind of a jerk move because he opens it in the lifelong home of Poe’s supposed horror writer rival Benson Dalton Gable. All sorts of Poe-related horrors/mysteries start occurring in the bookstore (e.g., a loose raven, the sound of a telltale heart behind a wall, etc.). The Baby-Sitters are on the case, ultimately revealing (SPOILER) that the mysteries are an elaborate PR stunt by the bookstore proprietor.

In The Bookshop Mystery (new to me, published in 1992 as part of the Girl Talk series), one of the talking girls has been volunteering at a local bookstore called Book Soup, run by a kind elderly man named Max Dalton. All sorts of terrible things happen (e.g., vandalism; theft of important businessy documents), and our chatty girls come up with an elaborate plot to catch the culprit (SPOILER: in this case, a greedy real estate developer who would like to buy up Main Street to put in a mall). BOOO! Very Hallmark villain of this dude. I do find it fun that one of the conspiring villainesses gets busted because her fish-shaped button gets discovered at the scene of the crime, easily linked to her because she wears a lot of fish-shaped accessories (awfully fishy fashion choice, if you ask me!).

Overall, I found the BSC book to offer a more compelling mystery. There were a variety of plausible culprits, whereas in the Girl Talk book, it became almost immediately clear to me that the sus real estate developer was, indeed, sus (I again credit Hallmark for this intuition). While both books featured high tension scenes where the girls had to collaborate to blow the lid wide off the case, I think the more drawn out BSC scene helped to escalate the stakes (I mean, they used a finger printing kit; that’s some A+ detective shit right there). It blew my mind that in one case the antics were motivated by a desire to save a store when, in the other case, the motivation was to sabotage the store (WOAH!). It was a fun coincidence that the deceased writer in the BSC book and the bookstore owner in the Girl Talk book shared the name of Dalton, leading me to believe that the books occurred in the same universe and that Max Dalton’s heir (ancestor?) went on to bless us with B. Dalton (perchance the B. stands for Benson?), where my parents got the BSC book. It is of concern to me that the BSC book concludes with an Author’s Note that reports that Dalton was a fictional character, though no such statements were made about any other characters. This suggests to me that all other characters depicted in the book are real live people, which really impacts my experience of the series. In other news: My copy of the Girl Talk book used to belong to a “Geraldine McCloat.” Geraldine, if you’re reading this, thanks for putting your book back into circulation! (And if you are a pre-teen PI reading this, maybe you can connect me with Ms. McCloat).

The last thing I will note is that both books were ghostwritten (explains why they are some of the spookiest in the series). The Girl Talk book is credited to B.B. Calhoun who seems to have written a variety of books in the 1990s, including the Supermodels of the World series (the most interesting thing I found on this topic was weirdly in the UCLA newspaper archives: https://dailybruin.com/1994/10/04/parents-public-leery-of-model) and bunch of books about dinosaurs (Bite Makes Right is my favorite title). I’ve long ago discovered that every book I read as a kid was written by the same five people using a multitude of pen names but B. B. Calhoun does not appear to be one of those five people, based on my cursory Google search. That said, I’m not super satisfied that I have fully explored this (again, if you are a pre-teen PI, this could be a great case for you!). Interestingly, the first few Girl Talk books are written by someone who did write every book I’ve ever read, Katherine Applegate of Animorphs fame; notably, the Girl Talk books confirmed to have been written by Applegate do appear to have more overt progressive lessons in them than this one did (unless you count the warning about late stage capitalism delivered via the conniving real estate developer storyline), a theme that I’ve observed in the Animorphs series as well. The BSC book on the other hand was written by Vicki Berger Erwin who has also written every book that I’ve ever read, ranging from a bunch of Scooby Doo books to a few books about small towns in Missouri.