I finished "Invisible Boy" - the third Madeline Dare book by Cornelia Read.

I liked it, it's a good book, it's very well-written. There are some things I'm still thinking about. For one thing, it's not really much of a mystery. It's pretty plain whodunit pretty early on. Maddie does less investigating than in Field of Darkness, (I haven't read The Crazy School, so no compare & contrast available there). She does a great deal of observing and commenting, and at times the commenting begins to sound & feel a bit like sermonizing. The plot uses a fairly quick & easy device to engage the reader's sympathy: the death of a toddler at the hands of his mother's abusive boyfriend. The evils of crack and poverty abound, as of course they do in real life; but I think we know that. Everybody has to be against little kids getting beaten to death. There's no ethical ambiguity available to Maddie here, as there was in "Field" - there's really no gray area to find her way out of.

Plus, the plot points involving attacks on her, and on a nice little old black lady, great-grandmother of the victim, are not satisfactorily resolved, or even explained. Quite a bit of text is taken up by these events, and having them dismissed as incidental assholery, and justified as neighbor boys looking out for a gang brother and/or the boyfriend of a childhood pal doesn't hang together at all, and turns out very unsatisfactorily. A weakness, in my opinion, but not fatal.

I also think the whole subplot (if it was even that much) involving Maddie's childhood pal and her neo Nazi husband was not sufficiently integrated into the main action. Clearly it was intended to illustrate that the cost of drugs, etc. is not levied only on the poor and black, but the whole relationship was a bit gossamer - it wasn't as well drawn as it might have been, felt rushed through.

The denouement felt rushed through too.

Not as satisfying an outing as the first in the series, though I do think it was wise to keep hubby "Dean" out of town through most of it.