5 Girl Detective Series to Reminisce About
If you want to take a break from social media snooping on exes, harken back to the days when looking for clues meant tagging along with your favorite girl detective. Below are five classic mystery novels from our childhood.
Sammy Keyes
by Wendelin Van Draanen
The series starts with Sammy who’s been deposited by her mother to live with her grandmother in a seniors-only housing unit. The first book in the series Sammy Keyes and the Hotel Thief starts with a bored Sammy using binoculars to look out a window. When no one believes her when she witnesses a crime, she decides she has to look into it for herself. Her investigations are paralleled with middle school adventures. Not many mysteries manage to be interesting and laugh-out-loud funny, but these do.
7 Sisters Mysteries
by Ellen Miles
Like the name suggests, the series feels a lot like what would happen if the Babysitters’ Club wound up solving sinister crimes while negotiating a family dynamic. The first book The Secret in the Attic can take you back to the simpler times of fun but required summer reading.
1-800-Where-Are-You
by Meg Cabot
The story starts when the main character Jess develops a psychic ability to find missing people after being hit by lightning. The series mixes together high school romance, mystery, and somehow timeless early 2000s references in a Midwestern setting. Start the series off with When Lightning Strikes.
The Mediator
by Meg Cabot
Shadowland is the start of a series with a full-on supernatural bent. After 16-year-old Suze moves out to California to live with her mom and stepfather, she finds that there’s a ghost named Jesse who lives in her bedroom and refuses to leave. Suze discovers there’s a suspicious pattern of supernatural events at her new high school that requires her work to solve.
Nancy Drew Mysteries
by Carolyn Keene
It makes sense to round off the list with the classic Nancy Drew books. The series’ world of never-ending vacations and old-fashioned outfits make them a quaint world to return to and the first four books have been reissued with new covers. Nancy’s Mysterious Letter leaves us with some parting advice as we return to a world of Insta-stalking: “Do act mysterious. It always keeps them coming back for more.”