The Blue Lady of Coffin Hall: 03/26/25

The Blue Lady of Coffin Hall by Carolyn Keene (2022) is the twenty-fourth book in the Nancy Drew Diaries series. Ned has gotten into podcasting and wants to do an episode on Harriet Coffin and Coffin Hall which has been turned into a public park and library. While there, a fire starts and Ned is accused of setting it. Can Nancy prove him innocent?

The way in which the Coffin Hall library is run is a sad commentary on how bad funding and management is these days for archives and it was published well before the current administration. It also hurts when the characters who run the place or work there are so blasé about the damage already done to items in their care.

On the other end of things is a new luxury housing condo complex going up. Their carelessness is also contributing to the decline in the land that the library sits on, as evidenced by the sagging tombstones, lopsided fountain, and the mud that Nancy ends up stuck in.

And all of this is as an aside to the ghostly appearance of the Lady in Blue. This not being the recent Nancy Drew TV series which had a supernatural bent, this Nancy wants to prove that the ghost is a hoax. And she does. But it seems that the people who perpetrated the hoax (and the destruction of property) get off too easily.

The next book in the series is Captain Stone's Revenge (2023).

Five stars

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