by JULIET WATERS

There's no mystery to the enduring appeal of Nancy Drew. She's a skinny, smart teenage blond with her own car. Still, there was always one thing missing (other than the realization that George was a little old for a tomboy). Nancy had plenty of spunk, but not much of a sense of humour.

Fortunately the quirky absurdities of Carolyn Keene's repressed, old-fashioned genre writing gave readers plenty to laugh at. In Confessions of a Teen Sleuth, Chelsea Cain has distilled all that was weird and hilarious about Nancy. But she's added a cruel twist of her own: Nancy getting old.

The premise of this parody is that Carolyn Keene was really Nancy's pathetic college friend who stole and distorted many of Nancy's stories. Now in her golden years, Nancy decides to sit down and set the record straight. "If you are reading this, then I am gone and this manuscript, per my instruction, has been delivered to the writer Chelsea Cain for publication as she sees fit." Gone? Where? The first clue is in the dedication: To Frank Hardy.

Confessions starts with vintage Nancy in 1926. She's the Nancy that fans remember, more or less. Slim, attractive, but not so attached to her "special friend" Ned Nickerson, as we've all been led to believe. Turns out she's always been pretty hot for Frank Hardy, ever since she met him and Joe on the trail of a missing waitress.

Now Joe is missing, and nothing will stop Nancy from helping Frank find his brother. Not the note sent to her house that warns her to "STAY OUT OF IT!", not her DUI record (she's been let off once with a warning, "but a second would be manslaughter for sure!"), and not the way she and Frank keep getting locked into rooms that take a mysteriously long time to get out of. Good thing they eventually do. Joe, and Ned it turns out, are minutes from being shanghaied into white slavery when Nancy finally gets around to saving them.

Throughout Nancy's increasingly modern life this is still Nancy Drew, even when it's sounding like Desperate Housewives crossed with Alias. She gets herself into some fine scrapes - a loveless marriage with Ned, a secret child with Frank - but nothing that can't be solved by a quick adventure. Post-partum depression evaporates after a trip to L.A., where Nancy discovers that her mother didn't really die when Nancy was three years old, but is instead living in a WW2 internment camp with her Japanese lover.

Sadly her mother remains elusive. "There would be no tearful reunion. She had made her choice. She had chosen true love with an Oriental over me. Yet her note... made me believe that I inhabited a place in her heart. She could leave me - and love me. It was all pretty complicated."

Yes, life as an ageing teenage sleuth is pretty complicated, and yet laughably simple. When a middle-aged Nancy discovers she's being used by the CIA in The Mystery of The Congolese Puppet, she sums it all up. "Adventures are supposed to be fun... Finding a hidden message in a tapestry, recovering a lost inheritance, thwarting a kidnapping - these all make the world a better place. But what you do isn't fun at all. You manipulate world events. You take sides."

Somehow, even as she goes through a divorce (she and Ned return to being "special friends"), discovers her housekeeper is really her aunt (and maybe a communist!), solves the brutal murder of nurse Cherry Ames, and survives underwater diving and cruise ship Jazzercise classes with Encyclopedia Brown, Nancy manages to stay innocent. Ah yes, she does finally get her man, Frank Hardy, right before mailing the Confessions manuscript in Mexico City, and right before setting out on "the most puzzling mystery I had solved to date." Although how she knows this ahead of time is, appropriately, a mystery.

Confessions of a Teen Sleuth by Chelsea Cain, Bloomsbury, hc, 160pp, $15.95