The Nancy Drew Files #29: Pure Poison (1988)
After flying to DC and spending the night in a hotel, she finally meets with Marilyn. The senator tells her that Beverly Bishop, the hottest gossip reporter around, wants to do a story on her and plans on putting her secrets in a book. She also has secrets on three other big people who will appear in her book. Her secret is that she used money to get Teresa, the tennis player, out of the foreign country where she lived and that she broke a lot of laws to help her. Bishop is quite the bitch, which we know because she always wears stiletto heels.
She shows up at the senator's office and makes a big spectacle of how she has all these little secrets and is going to make her pay big. Nancy agrees to dress up like Teresa and go to see Bishop. Though Bishop believes that she's the tennis start, no matter how much she begs, Bishop refuses to take her story out of the book. Nancy also gets to meet other suspects like Della Hawks. The young and hot wife of a super rich and old guy, she threatens to kill Bishop if she prints her secrets. She also meets Jillian, the other big gossip reporter in town. Jillian sees her out and about, thinks that she's Teresa, and asks her to give her an exclusive interview.
When she goes to see Teresa, she finds that someone ransacked her apartment and covered everything in stage blood. Teresa is so scared that she moves in with Nancy and Marilyn in the senator's apartment. There's also Matt Layton who is a congressman who wants Marilyn's job. Just to date these books a little, he's super hot and best known for serving in the Vietnam War. He goes on television to talk about how Marilyn is a terrible senator and how he would be the better choice, but he stops just short of announcing his own run for office.
Word comes down that Bishop is dead. Someone shot her in her home. Conveniently, Marilyn had a gun for protection that went missing, which is the same caliber of gun used to kill Bishop. Nancy goes with her to check things out and runs into Detective Flynn. He's in charge of the investigation and a close friend of Marilyn's, so he believes that she's innocent. While watching the last interview that she gave, Nancy notices that Bishop kept playing with the bottom of her shoe.
She meets up with Dan, who is the main security guy for the senator. He appeared in the other book too. They go to the morgue, get access to Bishop's clothing, and find a key hidden in the bottom of her shoe. As they head back, someone chases them, Dan has her get out, and she later hears an explosion that makes her just know that Dan is dead. Despite calling the police and every hospital, no one knows anything about a car accident or an explosion. She goes back to see Marilyn and then decides to check with Bishop's publisher.
While in the waiting room, someone comes in to deliver some mail, believes that Nancy works there, and lets her take delivery. She finds the three chapters that Bishop wrote about her big three and just takes them. There are chapters on Jillian, Della, and Marilyn but she hadn't yet finished her last chapter. Nancy finds out that the key belongs to a locker in the YMCA in the Vietnamese part of town, but when she checks the locker, she finds a package and runs off with it, only to find lots of money inside. A Vietnamese man goes over to the locker, opens it, and seems unhappy when he finds it empty.
She then starts asking around town about the man and finds a restaurant waiter who knows the guy is Louie. He says she doesn't want to mess with Louie until she says Bishop sent her and then gets right through. Louie, as it turns out, is a former secret military forces guy. He has evidence that Matt Layton isn't such a nice guy and that he actually was behind a group of men who stole from the military and the government and sold supplies to bad guys.
Once she hands over the cash, he gives her a tape with all the evidence on it. When she goes to leave though, the door is locked. Someone also set the building on fire. Louie shows her where the fire escape is, but as soon as they get outside, someone starts shooting at them. That's when Nancy sees Matt Layton with a gun pointed in her direction. She rushes back inside and decides to escape by climbing up the chimney to the roof.
Though this totally works, she drops the only copy of the three book chapters and watches in horror as the pages go up in flames. After hiding the tape on the roof, she manages to get back to the bottom floor and finds people shooting at her. Nancy keeps running until she gets back to Marilyn's apartment. Instead of being home free though, she finds Layton waiting for her.
They have a fight, which leads to him confessing everything before pulling out his gun. Just as she goes to kick it away from him, the cops burst down the door. They had the apartment bugged after Marilyn became a suspect and heard everything. The cops take Matt away, while the detective stays behind to make sure Marilyn is okay.
Marilyn reveals that the publisher plans on running the book without the three missing chapters and that the company hired Jillian to write a book on Bishop's murder. Detective Flynn then tells Nancy that she has the stuff for politics, but she tells him that she just wants to go back to River Heights where things are normal.
*Marilyn does some flirting with Carson on the phone at the beginning and then in person at the end. It's weird that he doesn't really ever date though. A handsome, rich, and successful lawyer in a small town should be beating women off with a stick!
*This is quite possibly my least favorite Nancy Drew cover ever. There's something about the white tights with the white skirt that makes me want to scream.
*Even though Teresa is from another country and Hispanic, she and Nancy basically look like twins. I thought Sweet Valley was the only town with doppelgangers!
*To make her look more like Teresa, Nancy wears a “dark tan foundation.” That totally made me think of black face and made me cringe.
*There's no explanation for who did the blood and stuff at Teresa's apartment. Marilyn assumes that it was people from her former country who are unhappy at her for leaving, which means there's probably another book about these two.
*The title – Pure Poison – comes from Bishop's nickname in Washington DC, which is the Poison Pen.
I never thought of it before but your right. Carson never dates anyone. He really should be getting hit on all the time.
ReplyDeleteThe blood in the apartment was weird.
There's one book where he and Nancy went on a cruise and he ignored his daughter for some woman, but then the woman turns out to be a black widow or something like that lol
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