The Hardy Boys 7 The Secret of the Caves by Franklin W. Dixon

The Hardy Boys 7 The Secret of the Caves by Franklin W. Dixon

Frank and Joe are back with their friends to solve another mystery. The major plot, occupying their father, is ongoing sabotage at an important new radar installation. It’s obvious from the beginning that this is going to tie into the smaller mystery that the Hardy’s get involved in. That’s finding a teenager’s missing brother, a college professor who recently returned from a country hostile to the United States. Could his disappearance be connected to his work in that nation?

 

The best part of this novel was a “trick” that gets played on Frank and Joe to scare them away from searching for the missing man. Someone tells a college fraternity that the Hardy’s are planning to pledge and the fraternity is encouraged to play a rather extreme prank on them that involves tying the brothers up and leaving them on the rail road tracks. This looks like an extreme attempt to murder them, but they really weren’t in danger. And while this level of hazing would bring in law enforcement today, it felt believable in the context of the 1960s when this book was rewritten.

 

The brothers also have to figure out how to deal with a person suffering from multiple personalities and this too came off better than I expected. While they find the encounter unsettling, they treat the man with respect and compassion as one would expect of the two.

 

When push comes to shove, the bad guys in this book are all bad and the reader has a pretty good chance to figure out who they are. The boys and their friends have to work around a lot of obstructions, but in the end they figure things out and make the country a little bit safer from its enemies.