Pete Crenshaw’s grandfather, Ben Peck, an unsuccessful inventor is about to embark on a road trip across the USA to demonstrate his latest invention to potential investors in New York City, and because his daughter is worried about him, she decides the best way to keep him out of trouble is to make three teenage boys – The Three Investigators – accompany him, as Peck has his eccentricities. But that is the least of the problems.

Peck is convinced that his neighbour is trying to steal his inventions, and when said neighbour starts appearing at various points on the road trip, it becomes clear this is more than simple harassment, but something more dangerous.

A very late (37 out of 43 or 44) and quite rare outing for the Three Investigators, I thought I’d take a look after reading a modern mystery for children – Sabotage At Sea – and compare it with something from (ugh) forty years ago. Well, there’s a simple comparison – Sabotage At Sea is great, and this… isn’t.

I’ve enjoyed the majority of my rereads of this series over the years and have always been a fan of M V Carey’s entries into the genre, but overall my favourites have been the stories with one foot in the Scooby Doo genre – The Singing Serpent, The Dancing Devil, The Sinister Scarecrow and so on. This one – the gang get followed across the country by a grumpy neighbour, some shenanigans wiht a biker gang, there’s something approximating a twist and then they all live happily every after – is just boring. I can’t believe that I speed-read the last third of a book that only has about 120 pages in it!

There’s a real sense that the author took a similar road trip (with a better reason to divert through Montana than here, which adds days to the journey) and decided to write about it. There’s some mildly interesting bits of trivia about the places they stop in and one bright bit was the stop in La Crosse, Wisconsin, but only because I stopped there when I did a similar road-trip (Chicago to Montana) in the opposite direction.

As I said, this is not a good book. Completists will want to seek it out but don’t break the bank on it. Thankfully, I didn’t…