The Ghost Parade

The Ghost Parade by Margaret Sutton (1933) I believe this is the fifth in the Judy Bolton mystery book series, which I'm reading in order—a plan I'd recommend for Judy Bolton books. Also, I'd just plain recommend this book—it's the craziest one yet. It's also the first to take place in a location away from Judy's hometown region, in rural Pennsylvania. She and a group of friends head north, just over the New York state and Canadian border, in the the Thousand Islands region, where they stay at a summer camp. Sadly, there is no depiction of them eating salads with Thousand Island dressing, but there is plenty of other bizarre food related elements to the story, for people (like me) for whom the food descriptions are a close second to the mystery. On the way to camp, they stop off at an auction, and Judy bids on these surprisingly large, odd, and inexpensive Native American masks—of course wins the auction—so they have to take them along—and naturally, they are at the center of a mystery. It kind of reminded me of that Brady Bunch Hawaiian episode where one of the kids comes upon a powerfully cursed Tiki idol. I'm not at all superstitious (ha), but I was saying, “Just get rid of those masks!” The funny thing is, they'd have had a pretty eventful time even without the mask angle—partly due to meeting the eccentric “Cat Lady,” who is the best character in this series so far. I can't go more into detail there without ruining it for first-time readers. The other funny thing is they take along Blackberry (Judy's cat) and The Ghost (Horace and Irene's cat) without really checking to see if it'd be okay, in advance, at the camp. Well, this was 1933—it's seems like there were a lot less rules then. Anyway, the cats do get significantly involved in the mystery.