Penny Parker is no Nancy Drew, but still a fun read! ( )

Did the clock in the Hubell Memorial Tower really strike 13 times? Penny says it did. Her father says not. In any case, the fire in the Prestons' barn is real enough. So is the evidence leading to Clem Davis as the arsonist. Penny thinks Davis is being framed. Her father isn't so sure.

The Prestons and the Davises aren't the only truck farmers [farmers who grow fruits and vegetables for market] who are having trouble. Another has his crop ruined. There's rumor of an underground organization being involved. Mr. Parker would very much like to expose them, and not just because it would make a good story for his paper.

Someone else Mr. Parker would like to expose is the joker who keeps sending him nastygrams collect. I've quoted the one from the first chapter. Much of it could have been written today, couldn't it? Strangely, none of the telegram clerks seems to have questioned whether Mr. Parker would want to pay to receive an insult.

Penny and her best friend, Louise, are part of a fund campagin to buy land and play equipment so the 60 kids at the Riverview Orphans Home will have a summer camp. A local real estate man, Clyde Blake, makes a generous donation. Could it be that he has some land he'd like to sell for that camp?

One of the orphans, a little girl named Adelle, is terrified of cars. Like Kinsey Milhone, Adelle survived the car crash that killed her parents. In Adelle's case, though, the accident was caused by a hit-and-run driver. Adelle can't describe him well, but insists she can identify him. There's a very nice man who would be willing to adopt her, if only he hadn't been pushed out of his job so someone else could have it. Where was that job? At the Hubell Memorial Tower, of course.

As usual, Penny is told she has too much imagination. Can she solve all of the mysteries? Of course she can -- it's her series. How she does it makes for fun reading.

Didn't notice it until book eight but I just checked the first seven books. This is the book where City Editor Dewitt starts getting his surname spelled 'DeWitt'. I wonder why.

We already know from the first book that Riverview has a live theater, so I suppose it's not surprising that Mr. Parker calls the movie theater Penny was at a 'moving picture theatre' in chapter one. (I don't know if the USA had already changed the British spelling to 'theater' by 1942 and Ms. Wirt & editors didn't notice she'd spelled it the old way, or if it hadn't been changed yet.)

Good thing this book came out in 1941 or one of Penny's sentences in the last paragraph would have been quite tasteless.

Wish I knew who did the frontispiece. Held up to good light, it seems as if there's a faint signature under the shoe of the guy who is flipping another guy, but I can't make it out. ( )