Meddling Kids

In 1977, four teenage detectives and their dog close their last case. They unmask a fortune hunter posing as a lake monster in the mining town of Blyton Hills, Oregon. Thirteen years later, the Blyton Summer Detective Club has come apart.

Andy is a drifter, wanted for a crime she says she did not commit. Kerri tends bar in New York and is losing a fight with drinking. Nate has spent most of the years since in psychiatric wards, still hearing the lake at night. Then Andy visits the man they helped convict, and his story does not match what she remembers.

The four reassemble around a case nobody else thinks is open. It sends them back to Deboën Mansion and the flooded valley below it, chasing the same clues they chased as kids, minus the certainty. Cantero writes it as a Scooby-Doo mystery pushed until it cracks open into cosmic horror.

The comedy comes from four exhausted adults who still talk like children's book heroes. Old grudges and real grief share pages with creature-feature set pieces. Farce and dread swap places inside a single scene. The timeline splits between the present investigation and what happened at Sleepy Lake, told in short, fast chapters.