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Tap Dancing and Cat Burglars

Author: Carolyn Keene

In The Clue of the Tapping Heels, Nancy is back, hot on the trail of a twisting mystery. This time, she’s embroiled with a retired actress, Miss Carter, who is haunted at night by a strange tapping sound throughout her house. While it may sound ghostly, Miss Carter thinks the intruder is very human, because her purebred Persian kittens keep going missing. Can Nancy stop the cat burglar, and perhaps bring the sweet old woman a happily-ever-after with her long-forgotten beau at the same time?

It’s Nancy, so of course she can. Not only that, but she can also solve the mystery while performing an advanced tap-dancing show, because Nancy is skilled at everything, and this time, the new “thing” is dancing and, of course, a sudden expertise with Morse code (which comes in quite handy).

As Nancy sinks her teeth into the mystery, however, it turns dangerous. Someone wants our wily teenage sleuth dead – and they are more than willing to cause collateral damage. We got both a car bomb and Nancy and Ned locked underneath a burning stage.

Alongside the more serious tone in this, Nancy’s sixteenth adventure, we get introduced to an abusive foster family who locks a mentally ill child away for years. This child’s diary leads Nancy to suspect that the cat burglar and the tapper are two entirely different people – with two different motives. And we’re not even done with our suspects.

Image by End from Pixabay

It’s a more complex, more serious mystery this time . . . but despite the 1969 version of The Clue of the Tapping Heels having my favorite cover (love the lurid 70s green alongside the beautiful face of a Persian cat), it doesn’t have my favorite plot. I like that the story here is more complex, and there is some real danger, but it’s also a little hard to follow three separate possible villains, each entangled but with their own subplots and motives. In the end, I Googled for a summary, just to help me put two and two together.

I also just wasn’t as into the themes. Child abuse is far too dark for a Nancy story, and I didn’t like how rough the characters were with the cats. The actress was far too dreamy and helpless, the girls’ boyfriends are sidelined yet again (they’re more in the role of free labor than actual boyfriends, and we even see Ned get temporarily miffed about it), and Nancy’s growing repertoire of abilities is getting a little too ridiculous to nod at and move on.

Not to say that this was a bad story. It certainly wasn’t. But it wasn’t my favorite. It needed to be less complex, cozier, and more realistic all in one.

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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