The Dark Deception

At this point, I’m less than a month away from my cancer surgery and I’m deep in the throes of getting pre-operative clearance from my primary care doctor and cardiologist. As a result, it feels like I’m spending a lot of time in waiting rooms, either waiting for doctor’s appointments, or for tests. To me, the best way to spend that kind of time is with a good book. To distract myself from dwelling too long and hard on the forthcoming surgery, I picked a fun book based on one of my favorite childhood cartoons. It helps that this particular book was the sequel to one I read recently and truly enjoyed. The book I read was The Dark Deception, which is the second book in the Daphne and Velma young adult series. The author was Morgan Baden, who I’m pretty certain also authored book 1, The Vanishing Girl. The first book’s author was listed as Josephine Ruby, which seems like it must have been a pen-name picked to honor Scooby-Doo co-creator Joe Ruby.

At the end of The Vanishing Girl, Daphne’s friend Marcy suggests that Shaggy Rogers is hiding a deep, dark secret. The Dark Deception opens with Daphne and Velma trailing Shaggy, trying to figure out what that secret actually is. Just as they begin to get their first clues, a batch of crystals suddenly wash up on Crystal Cove’s beach. The town has a history of disappearances being tied to a mysterious crystal. That same crystal happens to be in the possession of Shaggy’s father, who is descended from the original settlers. The town also has a long history of paranormal occurrences, or at least occurrences the populace attribute to paranormal causes. One of the old paranormal stories involved a mysterious figure known as the Lady Vampire of the Bay and people have begun to see her lurking around town. Daphne and Velma begin to think the crystals must somehow be tied to whatever secret Shaggy is keeping. What’s more, Daphne now has a summer job as an intern for Crystal Cove’s newspaper and her boss has her out looking for clues to whatever is going on with the mysterious crystals.

As Daphne and Velma investigate the case, they discover several red herrings. They also have to navigate some real teen challenges such as attractive peers who might make potential romantic partners, challenging friendships, relationships with parents, and building an honest yet positive self-image. Over the years I’ve known numerous people who have wondered why Velma didn’t just get contacts when she was so blind without her glasses. The book does a nice job of allowing Velma to experiment with contacts only to discover they aren’t for her. I was glad to see the journey since it echoed elements of my own experiments with contact lenses several years ago. As I’ve indicated, Shaggy is a much more integral part of this novel and we can see the core group of “meddling kids” starting to bond as a unit. Fred still largely exists as a side character, but he takes a more important role here in the second book. Scooby still acts more like a real dog than a talking cartoon dog, but it works in this novel-length exploration of the characters. The Dark Deception is published by Scholastic Books and is available wherever fine books and ebooks are sold.

As I mentioned in my look back at The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo, I thought one of the missed opportunities of the various Scooby-Doo series was to show how dangerous real criminals could be compared to the ghosts and monsters they pretended to be. The Dark Deception gave us a taste of that and did show how a desperate human might actually be scarier than any ghost or vampire. My Scarlet Order Vampire novels also look at how humans motivated by greed and power can sometimes be scarier than so-called monsters. You can learn more about those novels by visiting http://davidleesummers.com/books.html#scarlet_order.