Liz Austen is on PEI for a softball tournament. Her team’s early exit is a disappointment, but she’s got other entertainment in the form of a murder mystery weekend at Green Gables. She befriends a Japanese girl, Makiko, and they team up to solve the case. But the fictional murder mystery soon turns deadly for real. Is this a case that the girls can solve?

I first read this in middle school, likely just a year or so after my own trip to PEI, so I probably enjoyed it for that reason. It is a pretty dark mystery for middle-grade fiction, or at least darker than I remembered. I laughed and cringed a bit at Liz’s first-person narration; sometimes she was outspoken in socially awkward ways that reminded me of my 12-year-old self, especially the bordering-on-condescending way she explains things to people who might not know them. (I thought I knew EVERYTHING when I was 12.)

This book was first published in 1987 and shows its age in the absence of cellphones, computers, and internet. That said, the actual plot of the mystery doesn’t really hinge on them, so I think it holds up overall. Where it holds up less is in some of the dialogue involving Makiko; she speaks in some broken English, and some of the locals’ interactions with her are a bit othering. I think a novel of this type written today would have more nuance. ( )