Review by Frank Plowright

It’s 1930s week in River Heights, and everyone is dressing in old clothing, driving vintage cars and using old technology for a week prior to a charity auction celebrating the centenary of the local Stratemeyer Foundation. It’s Stefan Petrucha’s clever tip of the hat to the decade Nancy was created, which ought to enable the series art to be pepped up, and indeed Sho Murase is a little more expansive in showing the period details, which at the start is a welcome improvement from the constant close-up panels. However, it’s only temporary, and people are still drawn with angular, pinched faces.

The maguffin is a dollhouse in which posed figures engage in burglaries only for similar crimes to take place in the town. Wealthy, but eccentric Madame Blavatsky believes the spirits are somehow responsible. Nancy usually occupies an extremely rational world, but early in the story Petrucha has her bang her head, opening to the door to the possibility she may be hallucinating. Also restricting her more than usual is River Heights not using technology invented post 1930, so there’s no heading online for research. It’s a contrived limitation, as surely getting to the bottom of robberies would be considered of greater importance than maintaining a pretence, yet so it goes.

Other anomalies include what’s seen during a séance, cleverly written to include Nancy’s narrative captions doubting the reality of what the pictures show, and a great haunted house sequence toward the end.

This is the best of the Nancy Drew series by Petrucha and Murase to date. The mystery is perpetuated until the end, there’s a clever solution and motivation, and the art is slightly more appealing.

The Haunted Dollhouse is combined with previous books The Demon of River Heights and Writ in Stone in the large format Nancy Drew Omnibus, or with The Girl Who Wasn’t There, the next in the series, as the second Nancy Drew Diaries.