"The Hidden Staircase" by Carolyn Keene

This book is less of a "mystery" and more of a "how will Nancy Drew figure out what the audience already knows?" And that's entirely due to its title. If the title is The Hidden Staircase, it stands to reason that the book will involve a hidden staircase, and it's not that much of a leap of logic to conclude that "miscreants using said staircase" is probably the reason a house is suddenly supposedly haunted. Ah, metagaming.

("Miscreants on the hidden staircase", by the way, is exactly the reason why the house suddenly seems haunted. I'd spoiler-tag that, but I firmly maintain that anything I saw coming by page 3 isn't exactly a spoiler.)

There are some oddly credulous police in this town. Unlike the police in most young-detective books, they take Nancy Drew seriously... but almost a bit too seriously. She is an 18-year-old girl with no actual qualifications. Maybe not much goes on in this town, so they have nothing better to do than wholeheartedly believe Nancy Drew when she tells them something weird is going on.

Granted, she's right, but so are all the other detective book protagonists who get ignored because they haven't actually got any evidence. Or who at least have to work a bit harder to convince the police that they're telling the truth.

For me, the most shocking part of this book was that on page 122, Nancy actually said "become ill" in cold blood. (I should explain that, shouldn't I. My grade school grammar textbooks were always weirdly insistent that you should never use "took sick" for anything ever, and that you should instead use "became ill". We mocked this relentlessly, because we customarily use neither of those--we tend to say "get sick" or "come down with [insert illness]"--and we thought "become ill" was clunky and so overly formal that nobody would ever actually say it.)

The staircase is not actually as M. C. Escher as it appears on the cover.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for scary scenes, a "haunted" house, and kidnapping (not of the protagonist).

3 stars. I suspect that if I'd started reading these when I was like thirteen, I would have loved them; however, I'm not thirteen, and so I'm indifferent to them.

(Endnote: "shh i'm hiding" -the staircase)